Best Drafting Games

What drafting is, and the four shapes it comes in

A draft is any system where you choose from a limited shared offer and the remainder becomes available to your opponents. That is the whole definition. What makes it interesting is the second question every good drafting game forces on you: is this card worth more to your plan than it would be to the player who picks next? Taking a tile you cannot even use, purely so the person on your left cannot have it, is a legitimate and often correct play. Groups who work that out tend to get sharper at these games in a single evening.

Four shapes cover almost everything on the shelf. Pass-the-hand drafting deals everyone a hand, has all players choose simultaneously, then passes the rest along, which is how 7 Wonders and Sushi Go! work. Open-market drafting puts a face-up display in the middle and players take from it in turn order, as Azul, Cascadia and Faraway do. Identical-hand drafting gives every player the same cards, so the game becomes predicting what everyone else will play. And component drafting swaps cards for physical bits: dice in Sagrada, dominoes in Kingdomino, little plastic dinosaurs in Draftosaurus.

Two other things are worth knowing before you shop. The mechanic came into board games from collectible card games, where booster drafts had been standard for years, and one of the earliest board game examples is Fairy Tale, Satoshi Nakamura's 2004 Japanese card game, which does pick-and-pass almost exactly the way modern designs do. It was 7 Wonders, six years later, that made drafting mainstream. The other thing is speed: when everyone picks at the same time, extra players cost almost no extra time, which is why several games below handle seven or eight people in twenty minutes.

Best card drafting games

Our first recommendation is still the game that popularised all of this. Antoine Bauza's 7 Wonders seats 3 to 7 players in about 30 minutes, and it manages that by having everyone choose from their hand at once and then pass the rest. You build a city across three ages, gathering stone and wood and glass, chaining buildings into cheaper buildings, and buying military strength largely because the player beside you has been buying shields. It won the inaugural Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2011, the first year that award existed, and it sits at 7.7 on BoardGameGeek across more than 113,000 ratings at a complexity of 2.3 out of 5.

One buying note, because two editions are in circulation. The version on shelves now is the second edition from 2020, and it is the one we would order. Bauza's game is untouched; what changed is the presentation. Card costs moved to a clearer spot, the chaining icons were redrawn, the wonder boards got larger with separate day and night art, and the rulebook is roughly two thirds the length of the original. That second edition rates 7.8 across about 12,000 ratings. First-edition copies still play fine and still take the expansions, so this is a preference rather than a warning.

At exactly two players, 7 Wonders Duel is the better game, and it is a standalone box rather than an expansion. Bauza and Bruno Cathala rebuilt the draft as a pyramid of overlapping cards, so taking one uncovers what sits beneath it and you are choosing what to offer your opponent on every single turn. Three routes to victory, civilian points, a science rush or an outright military win, mean you cannot afford to ignore what they are collecting. It rates 8.1 across more than 110,000 BoardGameGeek ratings, which puts it among the highest-rated two-player games in the hobby.

The same pair then did it again, and this is the newest thing we would recommend in the category. The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth reached retail in October 2024, keeps the card-pyramid skeleton, and gives the two sides genuinely different jobs: one player moves the Fellowship toward Mount Doom while Sauron spreads corruption and hunts them down. It won Best 2-Player Experience at the 2025 International Gamers Awards and sits at 8.4 across roughly 22,000 BoardGameGeek ratings, which is higher than 7 Wonders Duel itself. A 2025 expansion called Allies adds 14 cards illustrated by Vincent Dutrait plus power tokens for calling in help. If you own Duel already, this is the more asymmetric follow-up; if you own neither, both are safe first purchases.

Best tile and token drafting games

Azul is the cleanest denial game in the hobby and it only takes 30 to 45 minutes. Michael Kiesling's 2017 design won the Spiel des Jahres in 2018 and rates 7.7 across more than 110,000 BoardGameGeek ratings at a complexity of 1.8. You take every tile of one colour from a factory display, place them on your wall for points, and pay points for any you cannot fit. Because taking all of one colour necessarily leaves the rest, half the game is spotting what your opponent needs and taking it first, or worse, leaving them a stack so large they have to eat the penalty. It looks like a decorative object, and it is the most confrontational light game we own.

Cascadia is the friendlier option. Randy Flynn's 2021 design won the Spiel des Jahres in 2022, plays 1 to 4 in 30 to 45 minutes, and has you drafting habitat tiles and wildlife tokens in fixed pairs, which is the clever bit: the tile you want is usually welded to the animal you do not. It rates 7.9 across nearly 57,000 ratings, the best score of any light game in this article, and it has a solo mode, so the box still earns its shelf space. Kingdomino goes lighter again. Bruno Cathala's 2016 Spiel des Jahres winner has a complexity of just 1.2 and runs 15 to 25 minutes, and it drafts turn order along with the dominoes: take the strongest tile this round and you choose last next round. That one rule is among the most elegant balancing devices we know of.

Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King is the step up from there. Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister's Kennerspiel des Jahres winner from 2016 has you draw tiles and set your own prices on them, then learn the hard way that a rival will cheerfully buy the tile you overvalued and fund their kingdom with your money. It runs 30 to 50 minutes at a complexity of 2.3. For dice instead of tiles, our pick is Sagrada. Adrian Adamescu and Daryl Andrews' 2017 game for Floodgate has players draft dice from a common pool to fill a stained-glass window, and the placement restrictions tighten with every die you add. It plays 1 to 4 in 30 to 45 minutes and rates 7.5 across roughly 49,000 ratings.

Small boxes, big drafts

Sushi Go! is how most people learn to draft without anyone telling them that is what they are doing. Phil Walker-Harding's 2013 card game for Gamewright is pass-the-hand drafting stripped down to fifteen minutes: collect sashimi in sets of three, stack dumplings for escalating points, and grab the wasabi before someone else uses it to triple a nigiri. Its complexity score is 1.2, about the floor for the hobby, and by the designer's own account it has sold over a million copies in more than twenty languages.

For anything larger than a small group, buy Sushi Go Party! instead. The 2016 follow-up seats 2 to 8 rather than 2 to 5, runs about 20 minutes, and replaces the fixed deck with a menu of more than twenty dishes you assemble before play, which solves the base game's one real weakness: after ten plays you have seen every card there is. It rates 7.4 against the original's 7.0. This is a case where the specific box matters, so we have linked the Party edition directly rather than sending you to a search.

Faraway is the small-box drafting game we have played most this year. Johannes Goupy and Corentin Lebrat's 2023 design for Catch Up Games has you drafting region cards from a display over eight rounds and laying them out left to right, then scores the finished row backwards, right to left, so a card only pays out if what it needed was already in place when you played it. Realising that the scoring runs against your instincts is the entire learning curve, and it takes exactly one game. It plays 2 to 6 in 15 to 30 minutes and rates 7.5 across more than 19,000 ratings. Two expansions have followed: People From Below in 2024, which also stretches it to seven players, and Under Starry Skies in December 2025.

Two more cheap ones we keep recommending. Point Salad, from Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin and Shawn Stankewich, is a 2019 AEG card game in which every card is a vegetable on one face and a scoring rule on the other, so you draft your own victory conditions and then have to chase them. Complexity 1.2, 2 to 6 players, 15 to 30 minutes. Draftosaurus swaps cards for wooden dinosaurs: the 2019 game from Antoine Bauza, Corentin Lebrat, Ludovic Maublanc and Théo Rivière has you passing a fistful of dinos around the table while a die dictates where in your park they are allowed to go. It runs 15 minutes, plays 2 to 5, and is the easiest game here to teach a child.

When drafting drives something bigger

Forest Shuffle is our pick if you want drafting with a real engine attached. Designed by Kosch and published by Lookout in 2023, it has 2 to 5 players drafting cards from a clearing to plant trees, then attaching the animals, plants and fungi that score off those trees, and the combinations build into something that feels much larger than the box suggests. It won the 2024 Deutscher Spiele Preis, appeared on the Kennerspiel des Jahres recommendation list the same year, and rates 7.7 across more than 22,000 BoardGameGeek ratings at a complexity of 2.2. A game runs 40 to 60 minutes.

It's a Wonderful World, Frédéric Guérard's 2019 design for La Boîte de Jeu, is the tightest engine-drafting game we know. You draft a hand of seven cards, then face a genuinely uncomfortable question about each one: build it into your empire, or scrap it immediately for the resources that finish something else. It plays 1 to 5 in about 45 minutes at a complexity of 2.3. And if your group already owns Terraforming Mars, use the official draft variant rather than dealing project cards blind. It takes the game's most common complaint, that an unlucky opening hand can settle things early, and replaces it with rounds of picking and passing. Plenty of experienced groups now treat that variant as the default setup.

Three more use drafting for something less obvious. Blood Rage, Eric Lang's 2015 game for CMON, opens each of its three ages with a card draft that sets your entire plan for that age, which means a miniatures game about Viking clans is largely decided by what you take and what you deny at the start. It plays 2 to 4 in 60 to 90 minutes at a complexity of 2.9. Between Two Cities is the strangest and the friendliest: you build one city jointly with the player on your left and another with the player on your right, and your final score is your weaker city, so drafting tiles that help a neighbour is how you win. Stonemaier's current printing is the Essential Edition and it handles 1 to 7 players in under half an hour. Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest, Paolo Mori's 2022 game for the same publisher, deals every player an identical hand of pirates. Nothing is ever taken away from anyone, so it is drafting only in the loosest sense, but the decision it produces, reading which card the rest of the table is about to commit to, is the one a draft is really about.

Check the box before you buy

Drafting games have an unusual number of siblings, spin-offs and standalone titles that look like expansions. These are the ones we see people order by mistake:

• 7 Wonders exists in a 2010 first edition and a 2020 second edition. Both play the same game; the second has clearer icons, bigger wonder boards and a shorter rulebook, and it is the current printing.
• 7 Wonders Duel is a standalone two-player game, not an expansion for 7 Wonders. The base game needs at least three players.
• Sushi Go! is 2 to 5 players with a fixed deck. Sushi Go Party! is 2 to 8 with a menu you build yourself. Searching for the name generally surfaces the base game first.
• Sushi Roll is the dice version of Sushi Go!, not the card game and not an expansion for it.
• Azul, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, Azul: Summer Pavilion, Azul: Queen's Garden and Azul Duel are all separate standalone games. The Spiel des Jahres winner is the plain Azul box.
• Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor, released at Spiel in Essen in October 2025, is a standalone game and is not compatible with the original Forest Shuffle. Alpine and Woodland Edge are expansions that do need the base game.
• Faraway's People From Below and Under Starry Skies are expansions rather than standalone boxes. People From Below is also what raises the player count to seven.
• The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth: Allies is a 2025 expansion and needs the base game.
• Between Two Cities' current printing is the Essential Edition. Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a different, heavier game built on the same idea.
• Cascadia has a Junior version, a Landmarks expansion and roll-and-write spin-offs. The award winner is the original box.

Our short list

• Best overall: 7 Wonders in its second edition, because seven players and thirty minutes should not both be possible
• Best at two players: The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth, with 7 Wonders Duel a close and cheaper second
• Best for cut-throat play: Azul, where leaving your opponent a pile they cannot use is the whole game
• Best family pick: Cascadia, or Kingdomino if the youngest player is under eight
• Best small box: Faraway, for backwards scoring that rewires how you plan
• Best for a crowd: Sushi Go Party! at 2 to 8 players with a customisable menu
• Best cheap pick: Point Salad, where you draft your own scoring rules
• Best with an engine attached: Forest Shuffle, then It's a Wonderful World if you want it tighter
• Best dice draft: Sagrada, and it plays solo
• Best drafting inside a bigger game: Blood Rage, and the official draft variant for Terraforming Mars if you already own it

If you are buying one box from this list, make it 7 Wonders in its current edition: nothing else gives seven people a real strategy game inside half an hour. If you want the sharpest version of the mechanic, it is Azul, and if you want the newest, it is Faraway or Duel for Middle-earth. Whichever you pick, the habit worth building is the one drafting teaches faster than any other mechanic: look at what your choice leaves behind before you make it. Every game linked below has a full how-to-play guide here on the site, so you can learn the rules before the first hand goes round the table.

Games Mentioned