fight between Pinocchio, Goldilocks and Snow White…who will win?

A good little draft game has been added to Gigamic’s collection of beveled boxes: it’s Once Upon a Draft. A game that mixes drafting and hand management mechanics, in the Universe of Fairy Tales. Recruit Pinocchio, Goldilocks and Puss in Boots and try to combine their effects! Here is my review of Once Upon a Draft.

Once Upon a Material

The edition of Once Upon a Draft is in line with what exists in this collection (which contains Dékal for example). For €15, you have canvas cards, tokens cut out in the shape of a heart, star or emerald. A small box that stores easily.

In terms of graphics, even if I am not at all a customer of this genre, I must say that it is well done: it is coherent, it has a face, and in the Fairy Tale theme it fits.

Draft + Hand management

Nothing revolutionary in Once Upon a Draft, but a rather well-made mix of several small mechanics. The game takes place in three chapters:

• Chapter 1: 8 card draft
• Chapter 2: confrontation
• Chapter 3: scoring

La draft

The game will have you draft 8 cards to compose your team of heroes, princes and princesses, monsters and Tales characters. When drafting these cards, you will think about two things:

• the confrontation, during which the cards will begin to score points, conditionally (= if such card is present in the trick)
• the end scoring, during which the text of the cards will apply again

With this in mind, you will select a card, and pass the deck to your neighbor. By spotting a card for the next time the deck comes up? Classic draft in short.

La confrontation

In my opinion, this is the strong point of the game: selecting a card is for the confrontation chapter, and for chapter 3 too. For example, the Witch brings you one emerald per “child” symbol. So if there are children’s faces during the round of the confrontation in which it is played, it will gain that many emeralds. But it will also work in chapter 3, where each child’s head will also bring you emeralds.

For other cards, the benefit is much less obvious, because you will be playing on a too circumstantial presence of other cards in the fold (Little Red Riding Hood waiting for the big bad wolf).

On the other hand, the player who plays the highest value card will gain a star, or 2 victory points. We can therefore try to only play high value cards to score the maximum number of stars.

Le scoring

At each trick, the players recover their played card. When your hand is empty, it’s time to count the points. And the 8 cards in front of you had better combine well to score additional points.

Once Upon an Ok Game

Between the draft and the double scoring system, Once Upon a Draft puts some good ideas on paper. For a family audience, or people who like small card games, it will do the job. As a vile optimizer, I have the impression of having quickly covered the possible strategies after a few games, and that is its big flaw. Afterwards I only played with three players, maybe with 5 or 6 the tricks become more contested and the dynamic changes a little.

In the end, the few good ideas make Once Upon a Draft a nice game to introduce children or novice audiences to drafting and hand management. Well served by its edition and its low price, it is effective in its formula and its proposition. It lacks depth and a bit of twist to rise a little higher in my appreciation scale.