Rejoice, my friends! It’s time for our annual convention, where collectors from around the world gather to trade their tiny postal treasures. We must prepare our most beautiful and best-arranged collection and show it to the expert crowd. If we do well, we may walk away with the top prize at this year’s Stamp Swap by Paul Salomon from Stonemaier Games.
As we were walking through the forest on a mild, damp spring morning, with the mist still rising and the trees and other plants slowly waking up as the sun was peeking over the horizon, we saw, to our great surprise, little creatures emerging from flowers and the hollows of the trees. Some wore cupule hats, while others had slung oak leaf ponchos over their bodies. We even spotted some with little string instruments made from walnut halves. They were magical to behold as they walked along the forest floor and formed little groupings, three side-by-side and three deep. These were clearly Pixies by Johannes Goupy from Bombyx.
Vikings were known for plundering, but what many people forget is that they also did a lot of trade. In fact, the Viking Era saw an increase in trade in the English Channel, the North Sea and the Baltic. There was one vessel that was specifically made for the exchange of large quantities of goods. It was a cargo ship with a shorter hull than the commonly known longships, which were mainly warships, and that had only a partial deck or sometimes none at all. It was specially adapted to the high seas to transport goods safely from shore to shore. To the Vikings, it was known as the Knarr by Thomas Dupont from Bombyx.
It was the 5th century BCE and we, the Athenians, had been victorious over the Persians. The Delian League was now under our military control and the income generated by federation fees had made us prosperous. It was time for an ambitious building programme and the most talented architects in ancient Greece were ready. We were going to build housing, temples, markets, gardens and barracks. Our planning rules were going to create a harmonious community, enhanced by plazas. We would create new quarries to provide the stone to stretch our city towards the sky. We were going to build our high city, our Akropolis by Jules Messaud from Gigamic.
The living room floor was a mess, sort of anyway. Everything was neatly arranged in a grid pattern, but there was no order to it whatsoever. Books were next to plants, which were next to games, which were next to frames all while some of our cats were tiptoeing around everything. All of it was only temporary though. I just wanted to get everything lined up, before returning it all to My Shelfie by Matthew Dunstan and Phil Walker-Harding from Lucky Duck Games.
Natural resources had long been depleted on Earth, but the asteroid belt was rich in ion and ore. The battle for control of these invaluable commodities had begun. We were part of this fight and were operating from our own Outpost 18 by Adam Wilk.
Changing your plumage from pure white to a rainbow of colours wasn't easy. It took time and patience. It was the fruit from the rainbow tree that contained the necessary pigment. Unfortunately, the fruit wasn't always in season and when it was, other birds were quick to eat it before I had a chance to get to it. It was a race, be it a slow and thoughtful one, to become Aves by Shi Chen from Play With Us Design.
The Great Plague was slowly becoming a thing of the past and you had decided to move into the country and start a new village. You had found the perfect location that was big enough to build new houses, workshops and other structures, while also being close enough to farmable land, a large wooded area and there were indications that coal could be mined nearby. It had everything to support a growing community of craftspeople and labourers. Now all you had to do was find Villagers by Haakon Gaarder from Sinister Fish Games.
You were proud of your large library and your hard-working group of scribes was continually adding new tomes, with wonderfully decorative lettering and illustrations. However, you only had so much gold and the best scribes weren't cheap, but you had to somehow continue growing your collection of books to keep the bishop happy and outdo other abbots who were vying for influence. So you persevered and did what you could to have the most Biblios by Steve Finn from iello.
Card drafting, and other forms of drafting, can be found in a large number of games and takes many different forms. In this article, I want to describe drafting in more detail and look at the benefits and disadvantages this board game mechanism offers.
