While grabbing coffee at the office today, I started chatting with some of Arrowhead’s game-designers. We were talking about MOBAs and since I haven’t really played any of those, I asked them to describe the drafting process I had seen on the TV broadcasts of the recent world championships. I found it very fascinating how the two teams take turns not only drafting from the list of heroes, but also get to ban others so the other team can’t pick them. I think that mechanic is interesting on many levels, and after a brief period of talking about it I suddenly came up with a design for a card-game using some of the same concepts. Here are the rules:

• Designed for 2 players, but might work with more
• The goal of the game is to build the best 5-card poker-hand
• Each player starts with a single card in his hand (hidden)
• Four community cards are placed face-up on the table
• Each players takes turn to
  • From the community cards:
    • Draw one card (draft)
    • Discard one card (ban)
  • Add two new community cards (from the deck) to replace the missing ones
• This continues until everyone has 5 cards in their hand
• Everyone shows their hand, and the player with the best poker-hand wins the round

My wife and I played a few rounds tonight and it actually works really well. It’s such a simple game, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it exists already. If it doesn’t I need to come up with a catchy name for it. Any ideas?