Reinvigorating the Draft

[Cleon]

Originally Posted by NecroBlade

Cleon's Magic-style drafting (http://www.heroscapers.com/community...fting+alliance) is a ton of fun. I've been using it with my roommate recently. In one 575 point draft he ended up with 2x Omnircons and Hulk! Risky but fun. I've lucked out a few times and gotten bonding groups. The best, though, was when he got Aubrien Archers and Venoc Warlord in the same draft! He averaged a Frenzy per order marker.

Our latest draft was 520 points (we pick a random total with 500 + d20*5) I got

220 Captain America
100 Major X17
120 Marro Stingers x2
080 Deathreavers x2

to his

120 Kaemon Awa
080 Raelin (RotV)
110 Roman Archers x2
200 Marro Drones x4


My better drafting and play strategies have kicked his butt so far, but he's learning.

Thanks NecroBlade! I really hoped you would like it, I find it very fun and interesting.

Oh and thanks for posting it in the thread title 1Mmirg!

[Cleon]

Whoops double post, my bad...

[Cleon]

Sorry to make a third post in a row everyone, but nice ideas and threads peeps! I just got through checking the other threads, great!

[1Mmirg]

Added a note/variant on the Wave-specific draft that worked really well with our game tonight--and incorporated other suggestions and ideas thus far.

Love to hear more about others' uses of the draft.

[gamjuven]

Alright, so here is how I do the random draft Heroscape. I'll post two variations.

1. First one, totally blind random draft
Let's say you have 4 players that want to play a quick game of Heroscape. All you have to do is decide on how many cards everyone should have. 3-5 cards should suffice. You then mix up the character deck and then deal out 3-5 cards to everyone. Make sure that if someone gets a common squad, that nobody else gets the same squad. This makes sure that the armies are different, so nobody gets confused, and so nobody will be attempting to draft the same figures. That's basically it. If you want it to be even more random you could have each person turn their heads, have the dealer keep shuffling until the player says stop, then give them the card you were currently on. It doesn't really matter. What you now have is a bunch of people with the same number of cards ready to do battle.

Don't worry about the point difference, there will likely be a huge point difference btw the players. This will get evened out while playing as most players will team up and go after the player with the most points, then move onto the next one, and so on and so on until the armies become equal and the normal diplomacy of multplayer games continues.

This is a great way to show people a variety of cards in Heroscape. This keeps the game more "fun" because it's less serious with army building and such. With inexperienced players who find it daunting to create armies with so many units out there this is a great way of playing as it's random for everyone.

2. Another way you can play is by a psuedo-blind with some drafting involved. This is the way I played my game last night with 3 friends. You can check out the battle report here: http://www.heroscapers.com/community...ad.php?t=18140
It was a thrilling game and a great way to play if you want to have some randomness, but also soem drafting. It's a good middle ground for people who want to try different armies.

What you do is deal out 1-2 cards to each person randomly, then you draft as normal. Let's say you have 4 people who want to play. You deal out 2 cards to each person. Let's also say that you want to play a 500 pt game. You now build an army up to 500 pts using the cards you already have. For example I recieved Khosumet and Sonya Esenwein in the random picking. I would now choose an army up to 500 pts. I would most likely draft units that work well with what I got. Cyprien and Anubian wolves come to mind.

As I said this is a great way of playing if you have people who just seem to want to play the same army every time. This almost forces them to choose something different. You can be surprised when you find a combination of figures you wouldn't normally think of. Sometimes there are just so many figures out there it's daunting for even an experienced player to decide what to draft (especially if they have to choose first). Sometimes it's nice to have part of the army chosen for me. Then using those first figures I can build something from there.

Hope that helps. Enjoy this way of playing. I know I do!
Any questions feel free to PM me or just post and I'll try to answer them as quickly as possible.

[1Mmirg]

Awesome ideas, gamjuven. Thanks for posting. I have to try that partial-blind/random approach and see what we get--seems like a great way to encourage original armies.

Also, for the first option, at my home we usually play with 3 (my wife and daughter and I), so having it be totally random might really work--we have a pretty strong code in our house that "top dog" gets banged on by the others (keeps it fun and we like to avoid knocking anyone out of the game entirely until the end is nigh). This method would play into that perfectly and avoid my wife's lack of patience with deep and deliberated drafting.

We'll be trying both of these soon.

[pomme]

Me and my HS buddy are always trying different draft techniques. Recently we've drafted Only Heros, Only Squads.. this past weekend we played a game only drafting figures with a range of 1. That was a very fun game!

Other simple drafts have been Only Human, Only Large or Huge figures.. you get the idea.

[1Mmirg]

Thanks, pomme. Good call; I bet most of us have done all melee games, but I forgot to include that. Spreading it to include other types of similar limits could be really interesting. (Definitely might help dust off some of the less used units!)

[NecroBlade]

Another variation of Cleon's M:tG draft is the "crap draft." Each player takes the "worst" card from their "pack," then after all the picks players pass their piles to the right. That player then makes the worst army they can out of the chosen units, and then armies are passed right again, so a third player ends up playing that army. Of course, you'll have to set some limits on the number of cards per army, or force the use of 2x commons minimum so players don't end up just throwing a bunch of 1x commons together. You'd end up playing a bunch of under-used, challenging armies.

[1Mmirg]

Sorry, everyone, NecroBlade is a curse .

Seriously, not sure what happened but in updating the first post to this thread the system seems to have just cut out over two-thirds of the post. It's just gone.

If anyone has any suggestions on restoring it, I'm all ears (yes, I have sent a PM to an Admin).

Also, if anyone knows a method of keeping a back-up of a thread like that (with lots of hyperlinks, etc.) I'd love to hear that too. I have tried to cut and paste into Word, but the links don't remain intact.

Thanks for your patience as I try to reinvigorate this thread...

[gamjuven]

I like copying and pasting into word before I post. The actual words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.

You may have accidently put in one of those banned words that screw up posts. You may want to check that.

Something like that happened to one of my posts. What I did was I kept copying and pasting into the 1st post until I found out what section was causing me to not be able to post. Then I copied and pasted that until I found the exact word that I did wrong, then I just fixed it. You have a similar problem it seems but it's not the same. Hopefully this works for you.

[1Mmirg]

Thanks, gamjuven. I usually do that with larger posts, but I didn't with this one b/c of all the hyperlinks and such. In my experience Word doesn't keep those--or was I just perhaps doing it wrong in some way?