Designer Diary: New Salem, or Drafting Lessons Learned

When Clayton Skancke and I designed New Salem in 2014, we were extremely excited to make a drafting game. The thing we loved the most about the drafting mechanism was that it facilitates simultaneous play. Most people dread waiting for their turn, so we want to avoid that whenever possible, and drafting allows everyone to be making decisions at the same time, no matter the number of players.

The main problem with drafting is that casual gamers can have trouble understanding how it works. They commonly make mistakes from which it can be difficult to recover, which makes them uncomfortable and creates a barrier of entry to learning the game or wanting to play it a second time. We saw too many casual gamers make these drafting mistakes in the first edition of New Salem, so we looked at the second edition of New Salem as an opportunity to simplify drafting and lower that barrier of entry for casual gamers. This diary discusses the drafting mechanism and how we simplified it in New Salem: 2nd Edition.

Starting Slow

New Salem has five rounds in which you draft the buildings you're going to play: In round 1, you draw three cards and end up playing two; in round 2, you draw four and play three; and in round 3, you draw five and play four, then it goes back down to draw four/play three and draw three/play two — kind of a bell curve of how much you draft.

We set up the rounds to start off slow so that a drafting mistake in the first round doesn't put you in a bad place from which you can't recover. If you're going to fail, we want you to fail early with little impact so that you can correct it and continue enjoying the game. Also, having the drafting pattern slow back down at the end keeps the game tight and intense in the final rounds. Your brain moves away from drafting cards and towards strategizing with others about who the witches are and how you're going to stop them.

Drafting Direction

In the first edition of New Salem, the direction you pass your cards alternates each round: clockwise in round 1, counter-clockwise in round 2, and so on. We did this so that if the player immediately to your right has a symbol on their character matching a symbol on your character card, they won't eat up all the buildings with that symbol every single round.

For example, if I am sitting to your right and we both have the Education symbol on our character card, I can't draft all of the Education buildings that come by, leaving you with none; you would at least be able to return the favor and draft all of them from me every other round.

While alternating drafting directions is fine for experienced drafters, those who aren't used to drafting get confused by it. If they passed clockwise in round 1, they might pass clockwise in round 2, or maybe in the middle of round 3 they'll be so focused on the cards they are drafting that they change their drafting direction accidentally mid-round.

This kind of mistake can be particularly devastating in New Salem because building cards are all over the table and a few cards can be drafted before someone realizes something isn't right. If that happens, identifying what exactly happened can be difficult and sometimes you just have to reset the round or deal extra cards to someone who is missing some. It's kind of a mess and not an experience we want in the game.

We were determined to make it easier for drafting newbs in 2nd Edition because it was the biggest barrier to more casual gamers enjoying the game. Thus, we decided to have players always draft clockwise. It was one of the most difficult design decisions we made because although it makes it easier on new drafters, some veteran drafters might think it's "unfair" that someone to their right shared a symbol with them and drafted all of the buildings they wanted.

In reality, although it may feel unfair every once in a while, only four building symbols appear on character cards, and each card has two or three symbols on it, so although the player on your right may share a symbol with you, the player to your left almost surely shares a different one with you and you drafted their buildings. They will see this if they look at all the character cards after a game, but we know that they probably won't and will be content to complain that they lost because they were put in an unfair situation. As game designers know, how players feel is far more important than the reality of how the game actually works, which made this design decision so difficult for us, but after playtesting it countless times with veterans and casuals, we are confident this was the right decision.

Drafting One Card at a Time

The other simplification we made to drafting in 2nd Edition was in how drafted cards were revealed. In the first edition, you draft all the buildings for a round, then reveal all of them at the end of the round when you add Hope and Despair to them at the same time. In 2nd Edition, everyone drafts one card at a time, then flips it face up and adds Hope/Despair to it immediately before drafting the next card.

In the first edition, faster drafters could go as quickly as they wanted, which meant that sometimes a slower drafter may have a few piles of cards waiting for them to draft. Each player could have a different number of cards in their hand, and more piles of cards are sitting around, which causes confusion if there is a drafting mistake.

Drafting and flipping one card at a time keeps everyone going at relatively the same pace. Faster drafters may have to wait a few seconds after they draft each card, but they would have had to wait for a larger chunk of time at the end of the round in the first edition anyway, so the wait time is distributed and it allows players to catch drafting mistakes immediately rather than at the end of the round when they may be too hard to correct.

It's worth noting that seeing each card the player to your left plays card-by-card does have a small side effect that witches can be detected mid-round, but it's worth it to reduce the impact of drafting mistakes.

Overall, since we have made these simplifications, we have seen players new to drafting have a much easier time playing the game. It's more approachable now, which means our pool of gamers who will enjoy New Salem has been expanded and we'll see it hit the table more often. Accusations of "YOU'RE A WITCH!" will echo through gaming halls for years to come.

Brian Henk