Everyone has their preferred sub-type of “X-and-write” game by now. Dice or cards, numbers or shapes, feather-light or lead-heavy—there are so many of these games that it’s easy to get hyper-specific about which of them appeal to you. With so many options out there already, it can be hard for a new X-and-write game to stand out without some kind of twist on the familiar formula
Enter Draft & Write Records, a (you’ll never guess) draft-and-write game for 1-6 players. It plays best with 2-3 players, and plays in about 30-60 minutes.
Gameplay Overview:
In traditional X-and-write fashion, Draft & Write Records is all about filling in boxes and triggering bonuses to fill in more boxes. Each round, players draw a hand of five cards from the deck, and play one card from hand each turn, passing the remaining cards to their neighbor after doing so.
Roughly half the cards in the deck let you fill in a space in one of your sheet’s six(!) ancillary areas, which will eventually provide bonuses (i.e., endgame points or bonus actions) when enough spaces are filled. However, the other cards in the deck allow you to hire Crew, which are the literal and figurative centerpiece of the game. Your player sheet’s Crew section comprises twelve Crew slots: one Lead Singer, four Musicians, three Production members, and four Backstage members. When you play a Crew card, you fill in its point value and four skills into a slot of the same type. When two adjacent Crew members share a skill, it also unlocks a Harmony, which lets you fill in a space in the Harmony section of your sheet, potentially triggering even more bonuses. Each unfilled Crew slot costs you points at the end of the game, so it is important to fill those slots as quickly as possible.
At the end of each round, players get the chance to claim goals. Four goals are always available from a massive deck, and are worth a variable number of endgame points, alongside some additional bonuses. When a goal is claimed, it is immediately discarded and replaced, and cannot be scored by other players—each player also has a personal goal, which can only be scored by them.
The game ends when any player scores six goals or fills all their Crew slots. Players then tally up the points earned from the various sections of their sheet, and the player with the most points is the winner.
Game Experience:
In many ways, Draft & Write Records is a bog-standard example of its genre, with little in the way of originality or excitement. However, a few clever mechanisms help the game stand out from its peers.
For starters, the Crew-hiring mechanism gives Draft & Write Records a memorable arc. Whereas most of the player sheet boils down to the same mechanism in slightly different configurations, the Crew section provides a much different puzzle, and one that evolves over the course of a game. Some Crew members are strictly better than others, but if you ignore the lower-scoring Crew too much, you won’t have anyone in those Slots—which can lose you quite a few points by game end! The varying skills for each Crew also shift how you look at each new card. Bad Crew cards might become incredibly valuable if they can net you multiple point-scoring Harmonies. It creates a deft mix of strategy, tactics, and push your luck, and feels distinct from other games in the genre.
Your Crew also injects some much-needed life into the drafting, and gives Draft & Write Records more interaction than your standard X-and-write. It’s easy to see what slots are available for other players, so the decision of which card to play and which to pass becomes meaningful. This is less important in higher-player games, where you are unlikely to see any cards a second time, but at lower player counts the drafting adds a pleasant bit of interaction.
Unfortunately, Draft & Write Records is held back from greatness by… well, by everything else. Aside from the two mechanisms mentioned above, everything in the game is pretty generic, and does fall into the “fine but forgettable” bucket so many of these games fall into. The goals are a particular letdown for me—swingy, random, unbalanced, and frequently just boring. Half the goals that came out in my games were either scored accidentally or completely ignored by players who didn’t care about them.
These issues would be less egregious if not for the game’s poor usability. It’s hard to tell whether some spaces are filled or not on the player sheets, and the use of colored pencils to represent different Crew skills is both fiddly and user-unfriendly, with some colors almost impossible to see under most lighting conditions. The goal cards also use some deeply mediocre iconography, with the text description relegated to small text down the side of the card rendering the goals even more likely to be ignored. These are minor issues, but they do stack up over time, especially when the turns themselves are so simplistic.
Final Thoughts:
Draft & Write Records has a lot of potential. The Crew-hiring and drafting dovetail together in a really interesting way, and lead to a surprising amount of interest and interaction between players. However, that potential threatens to be buried beneath the rest of the game’s mechanisms and usability. It’s still a fun time, but the inconsistency of the experience means I’m more likely to reach for a different game.
Final Score: 3 Stars – An enjoyable but inconsistent X-and-write, whose best ideas are dragged down by some uninteresting mechanisms and poor production.
Hits:
• Interesting drafting mechanism
• Crew cards tie the disparate game elements together beautifully
• Good replay Value
Misses:
• Secondary game systems are completely forgettable
• Significant production and usability issues
• Goals alternate between frustrating and uninteresting
