Start a draft
For a while I have been working on a generic draft engine for card games. In trading card games (TCGs), drafting is a way to distribute cards in a semi random way, where players interact with how cards are distributed. In the TCG world this is distinct from sealed deck (semi randomly distributed cards, but no player interaction during dustribution) and constructed (you design your deck before playing from a set of allowed cards).
Supported draft styles
My draft engine supports two styles of draft:
- Grid draft: A draft style for two people where you select rows or columns of cards from 9 face up cards.
- Regular draft: In this draft style you pick a card from a pack and pass the pack to the next player. It works with 2-8 players, but 6-8 is recommended.
These forms of draft can be used for most kinds of TCGs. Since the engine is not tied to any specific kind of game, you can draft anything you can give a name and an image. You can draft your family photos if you want to.
Drafts with custom content
The engine works by using a very simple JSON structure to supply card names and card images, it looks like this:
[
[
{
"name": "CardOnePackOne",
"url": "http://crazymedia.com/cardonepackone.png",
"id": 0
},
{
"name": "CardTwoPackOne",
"url": "http://crazymedia.com/cardtwopackone.png",
"id": 0
}
],
[
{
"name": "CardOnePackTwo",
"url": "http://crazymedia.com/cardonepacktwo.png",
"id": 0
},
{
"name": "CardTwoPackTwo",
"url": "http://crazymedia.com/cardtwopacktwo.png",
"id": 0
}
]
]
The values are pretty self explanatory, but for clarity:
- “name” – The name of the card, which you can export when finished drafting.
- “url” – An URL pointing to an image of the card.
- “id” – Not in use, so 0 is a fine value.
The engine comes with several predefined card list. Packs will then be drawn from those lists, but if you want to supply your own set (for example a cube or your own game) it is possible to start a draft where you send in any number of packs of cards using the JSON format shown above.
Have fun drafting.
