The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

On Friday, we just picked up and went to Lambert’s. Just, you know, for the hell of it. But that’s not all. We also played some Race for the Galaxy. Upon flipping randomly through the rulebook, I stumbled upon a “Draft” variant I hadn’t heard of. It sounded fantastic, so we tried it. It really ended up changing the game in an interesting way.

Basically, we dealt out starting worlds, as per usual, then separated the rest of the deck into 9 card “draft packs.” We passed them around, drafting them like Magic cards. Once we’ve drafted the whole deck, we all had small, individual decks with which to draw all our cards from. Then we played the game.

It worked really well.

Basically, it removed a large chunk of the randomness from actually playing the game. For example, I had drafted mostly rebel cards, so I knew I was attempting to set up a victory via Rebel military, and thus evaluated the cards I drew differently. Jonathan, on the other had, had gone for Galactic Federation all out, and was trying to make developing work for him. It was much more like a game of Magic, where you had picked your strategy beforehand and was just trying to pull it off, as opposed to doing the best with what you draw. It kept the game the same, but changed it a lot.

Of course, one of the benefits of Race is that it’s a fairly fast game to play, once you figure it out. The drafting added a long, long time onto the gameplay. I had first surmised that you might negate that by playing multiple games with the same deck, but I kind of went back on that after our second game. If you hadn’t done well drafting, you just had no chance. Even if the person who one the first game got a bad draw, someone else probably would get a better one who wouldn’t be you. It didn’t seem worth it with so many people at the table. But eh, maybe everyone else disagreed with me.

I don’t think this will undo normal Race play for our group, but it is a really, really neat way to switch it up, especially if the goal of the night is a night of Race, as opposed to one quick game before bed, which it often is in our case. If you own the game and a few expansions, give it a try.