House rules

A third person builds the list from a setup link. Neither player sees it before the first card is dealt, and the builder does not play.

This fixes the format's one structural unfairness. Normally the host picks the category, which means they have half-remembered the list and know roughly what is coming. Hand that job away and both players are reacting to the same surprise. It is also the funniest version, because the builder is writing to provoke you both.

Supported directly. Create a room, send the setup link to your third person instead of building a category yourself.

Announce a theme before the first card and both players draft to it rather than for raw quality. “Best breakfast”, “team that would survive a zombie outbreak”, “dinner party you would actually enjoy”.

The scoring is the audience vote, so a coherent five that tells a story beats an expensive five that does not. It also flattens knowledge gaps, which makes it the right variation when one of you knows the category far better than the other.

Honour system, but the vote link does the enforcing for you.

For four or eight people. Pairs draft head to head from the same category, the audience vote decides who advances, and winners draft each other from a fresh category in the next round. Losers become the audience, which keeps everyone in it.

Run the final on a bigger roster than the earlier rounds — a ten-slot final after five-slot heats makes the last draft feel like a final rather than a repeat.

Give one player a larger bankroll and the other more roster slots to fill. Twenty five dollars for five slots against twenty dollars for seven is a real contest between quality and depth, and it is the closest this game gets to a handicap system for uneven players.

Partly supported. The room settings are shared by both players, so run it as two rooms back to back and compare, or agree the constraint out loud and hold each other to it.

Set gives to zero and the only move on a card you do not want is to take it or let it go. It is a harsher, faster game — every bad card is your problem.

Set gives to unlimited and it inverts: the draft becomes about burning the other person's roster with things they cannot use. Both are one setting at room creation, and they are the two most different-feeling drafts on the site.

Three seconds on the clock. Nobody has time to calculate, so you find out what you actually think things are worth. Best played as a decider after a normal draft ends in an argument.

A series format. Whoever loses the audience vote chooses the category for the next draft, and keeps choosing until they win one. It self-balances — the loser steers toward ground they are stronger on — and it is how a single game becomes an evening.

Letting both players see the deck first. It sounds fairer and it removes the entire game. If you know what is coming, every bid is a solved arithmetic problem and there is nothing to misjudge.

Bidding in cents. Somebody always suggests it. Penny increments turn a bidding war into a war of attrition where the winner is whoever is most willing to sit there, and the clock stops meaning anything.

A points system instead of the vote. Assigning each name a value beforehand makes the draft a maths exercise with a correct answer, and correct answers are the one thing this game is built not to have. The vote is not a weakness in the design — it is the design.

Very large rosters. Past about ten slots the money stops mattering, because there is not enough to fight over per card. Twenty dollars over fifteen slots is a draft where almost everything goes for the minimum.

Most of these are a setting away. Create a room and set the bankroll, roster size, clock and gives to taste — or read how to play first if the base game is still new, and the category guide for what to draft.