Game Background: Draft Night is a Megagame that's 6 hours straight of futuristic fantasy football where you start with all of the stats but don't know what they mean. Is it better to be Swole or Hella Swole? What's the relationship between player performance and their cybernetic operating system? Players are pre-formed into teams that take turns drafting players and passing legislation with the ultimate goal of become World Champions.

My Past Megagames: This was my fifth ever megagame. I'd played an early run of online Den of Wolves, OWL League Season One (Fantasy Quidditch), and two different runs of Den of Wolves at GenCon (recapped here and here).

My Role: I was recruited last minute to be the Vice President of the Johannesburg Great Lakers, the schmoozer role that wasn't present on every team but could help their team gain a competitive advantage by helping whoever on their team needed it the most. I specialized as the VP of Sport, so we started with a bit of extra information about the stats.

My Team: Most of the Aegis crew from the previous day reunited under the JGL banner. Ben was the Owner, the political role in charge of drafting legislation to benefit our team and disadvantage others. Michelle was the General Manager, the ultimate decider on which athletes to draft onto our team. Mike was the Saber, the number cruncher that helped Michelle determine what the stats meant, and therefore, how good the athletes were. The three of them had participated in Draft Night 3077 and done fairly well, so we definitely started with a leg up in terms of knowing how the game worked.

My Game Plan: I had a large number of victory conditions in prioritized order, which helped provide direction. Ultimately, I needed to schmooze the other VPs to get Kudos (a limited resource that determined whether or not I made it to a Corner Office) and help my team do as well as possible. I decided to push hard for Kudos early on to secure the office before turning all of my efforts towards my team's victory.

What Happened: Unlike the other megagames I've participated in, there wasn't really an overarching narrative, but here's what I did over the span of the game.

Hustling in the Jack Ma Lounge: Michelle and Mike immediately told me to start trading our information about the athlete statistics with other teams to try and get as much as possible. I had a ton of fun kicking back with an imaginary glass of scotch and trading stats and Kudos, Mad Men style. I leveraged existing friendships with a few other VPs and my additional starting information to quickly gain my corner office, second only to one of our division rivals, VP Dylan from SPI.

Info Bartering: It quickly became clear that no one started with details on about 1/3rd of the stats, so Mike used his queries to learn as much as possible and get us new bartering material. By halfway through the game, we had complete information about what the stats were and how they related to athlete performance. Michelle and Mike tinkered with a massive spreadsheet, plugging in SaberSolver metrics to calculate base athlete performance and used it to decide who to draft. For people that were wondering, it wasn't actually good to be Swole or Hella Swole, which seemed counterintuitive to Michelle and me.

Swole Shenanigans: The first real test of my diplomacy came when someone wanted to pass legislation to make Hella Swole a GOOD stat. Despite it instinctively feeling wrong, we'd realized the dangers of Swoleness early on and had drafted accordingly. A few Owners wanted to undo our efforts with Yoga, which we couldn't let stand. I learned how the spreadsheets worked and ultimately made sure that VPs of teams that would be disadvantaged by Yoga knew how catastrophic it could be. Fortunately, we avoided that crisis.

Division Rivalry: Mid-day, we decided to shuffle up team rivalries within our division. It didn't have any impact this season, but it will for Draft Night 3079, which I hope to return for. Our intra-division rivals, the Toronto United, also absconded with our previous mascot, the Captain, building up the Good vs Evil dynamic of our teams.

Additional Performance Factors: I only touched very lightly on these aspects, mostly when tracking down information for my team members, but there were some cool factors that affected team performance. They included Performance Enhancing Cigars, athlete attribute BINGO that Michelle completed to give us an overall performance modifier, infrastructure investments, and Coach/Athlete specialties, which were a form of rock paper scissors (Defensive teams beat Offensive teams, which beat Special teams, etc). 

Opportunistic Offensive Owners: Similar to the near Swoletastrophy, legislation was proposed to ban Defensive playstyles, which was what we had been building towards. We spent a LOT of time panicking, even making an accidentally post-deadline deal to trade Coaches with another team in case the legislation passed. Fortunately, this was defeated in a landslide, barely being brought to the floor by Control before it was voted down by almost everyone except the people that proposed it.

Budgeting: Though Ben had a good handle on the legislation that was being passed, he was busy dealing with other Owners trying to screw us over, so I stepped in to help with the budget. Though I briefly experienced flashbacks to the most soul crushing job I've ever had, it was relatively simple to throw something together to make sure we never exceeded our salary caps and became as profitable as possible.

There Can Only be One Lindsey: Once we'd finished drafting, we got to drop a player. Obviously, it had to be #88 because her name was also Lindsey (sure she had the worst stats, but it was really about the name). We started a fun trend of how to dispose of these unwanted athletes, with teams ultimately submitting fun narratives for what they did.

The Endgame: To avoid coming off to braggy, I'll just say that we won a lot of the awards at the end of the game, most notably having the highest adjusted athlete performance, the most profitable team, and ultimately won the World Championships. You can watch the full season recap here:

My Overall Feelings:

The Best: I probably sound like a broken record here, but I really enjoyed my team. We work together so well and really trust each other to get our respective jobs done. Plus we completely dominated!

The Good: I had a great time working with the other VPs, particularly Cici of LGL and Dylan of SPI, the other two Southern division VPs. By the end of the game, all three of us had earned our corner offices, and we helped ensure our division's prominence within the League with our teams' strong performances.

The Bad: The only negative thing that I can really say is that it felt like some teams were way more advantaged than others at the start. There were two factors that seemed to really help boost performance- experience with how the game worked and an active Vice President. We were one of the lucky teams that had both. I'm not saying that we didn't work really hard to earn our achievements, but it did feel like we started with a significant leg up.

Recommendation: I really enjoyed this game, but I'm also a big fantasy football fan. If I didn't love tinkering with sports stats, I don't think I would have gotten as much out of the game. I preferred it to OWL League, which had a similar premise, though that was likely largely a factor of the shortened schedule (OWL League was two weeks long and felt like you never really got a break). I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it despite it not having any kind of overarching narrative, something that has been my favorite part of the other megagames I've played.

This Play: 4/5 stars

Draft Night 3078: 4/5 stars

--Theme: 5/5 stars

--Interface: 4/5 stars

--Rules: 4/5 stars

--Player Autonomy: 3/5 stars