Door 7

Let’s open door 7 of our MechanXmas 🎄 calendar! It’s card drafting! More specifically a closed draft. 🧐This is when players get a number of cards, pick from them, then pass their hand of cards to the next player. They then choose from the new set of cards received and continue like this until all cards are distributed. A lot of games use this clever mechanic and it is a great way to minimize draw randomness, but also to allow willful taking of cards, that you know would be too beneficial for an opponent.

Our favorite game utilizing closed card drafting is 🐰 Bunny Kingdom! It has a relatively simple concept, but it’s fun and quite strategic. We also love bunnies, so the theme is perfect! 🥰

⚙️ The game board is made up of a grid of 10x10 spaces. Most basic cards will show coordinates - if you choose these, you can place one of your bunny markers there. Your goal is to make big contiguous areas (fiefs), because you will score these at the end of each of the 4 rounds. A fief scores points according to how many resources it has, multiplied by how many towers its cities have, so getting a huge fief is not necessarily enough. You have to cleverly make them have as many resources and cities as possible.

☝️ This is where other types of cards come in. Some basic spaces will have standard resources or small cities on them, but to get luxury resources or bigger cities, you can pick cards which you can play before the scoring phase. You can also draft Parchment cards that give you scoring conditions for the very end of the game.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 When playing with 2 players there is an ingenious special variant. You don’t just get a hand of cards but also a reserve deck. Every turn you will draw one from your reserve deck, then choose one card to play and one to discard before you pass it to your opponent. This way you can go through the whole deck even with 2p, so no coordinates will be unluckily left out, and it also helps so drafting doesn’t get stale. Discarding cards your opponent might need can be mean but very necessary.

I think this is an extraordinary game, for gamers and non-gamers alike. 🥰