Tower Draft Format for the Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game. – By Tom Capor
An unofficial variant way to split up your collection into new and exciting decks to play against your frienemies!
You begin by shuffling your “collection” into one giant deck face down. Depending on deck size you’ll want about 50-70 cards per draft player. I recommend 60 cards per player to build 35 card decks. Or if you’re operating out of the core set, shuffle all the cards into the tower and draft until you have 55-65 cards and build a 40-50 card deck.
There are 4 “zones.”
The Tower – Contains stack of shuffled face down cards.
The Selection Pool – An area of face up cards that contain cards drawn from the tower that players can buy from.
The Buy Pool – Contains cards bought from the Selection Pool and cards drawn from the tower (if a player choose the option to not buy)
The Deck Pool – Contains cards formally used to buy cards and will be from which players will build their decks from.
What happens when it’s a player’s turn:
- Reveal 1 card from the tower and put it into the Selection Pool.
- Then that player may buy a card from the Selection Pool or draw 1 card from the Tower facedown into their Buy Pool.
How to “Buy” a card.
- The active player chooses 1 face up card in the Selection Pool.
- Player moves Y cards from their Buy Pool to the Deck Pool. Y is equal to the printed cost of the card. If the printed cost is X, then move all cards (if any) from your Buy Pool to your Deck Pool.
- Then move the chosen card from the Selection Pool to the player’s Buy Pool.
Player’s take turns until all players have drafted 50 cards. After which, move any remaining cards in your Buy Pool to your Deck Pool. From there, each player chooses a minimum of 35 cards from their Deck Pool to be their deck for the games.
FAQ:
Q: Can I peek at my face down cards?
A: Did I say you could peek!? No! Actually, I would discuss this as a group before playing to decide whether or not peeking is allowed. On one hand, having a mystery can add to the fun while on other would yield more tuned decks.
Q: 35 card decks are poopy, can we play bigger decks?
A: Yes, of course you can. The minimum deck size is 35 feel free to use all the cards you drafted. If you want to increase the minimum deck size I would suggest also increasing the tower size and the cards drafted count.
Q: I want to buy a card with a printed cost of X, how much do I have to pay?
A: All the cards in your Buy Pool. Even if it is only 1. I think this spices things up a bit.
Q: How do I choose the cards for the tower?
A: I would choose a good/random mix from whatever you have. I personally just grab my extra cards from duplicate packs I bought or the excess cards from the “1 of some 3 of others in a pack” era. Or you could have each player choose 60 cards to add to the tower. Doing so will take longer, but adds another level of strategy as players will have to decide between choosing good cards and bad cards to add to the tower.
Q: Can I buy the card that I just put face up into the Selection Pool?
A: Yep.
Q: So let me get this straight, on my turn, I put one card from the big deck into the face up area… face up. Then… I can either buy one of those cards or, since I probably don’t have enough to buy want I want… I have to take card from the tower and put it into my buy face down?
A: Yep, you got it champ.
Q: Can I peek at other player’s cards?
A: Again, talk it out with your group first, but generally no. It kind of takes good bit of the fun when drafting.
Q: What happens if the tower runs out of cards?
A: In this rare occurrence where players hardly bought any cards and when they did, they bought only high or X cost cards… Simply take turns buying cards from the Selection Pool until you can no longer. At which point, you should have enough to break the 35 count barrier. If for some reason you can’t, play with what you have and suffer the consequences! Muwhahaha…