What you end up with
Every player holds a face-down stack. They each take one card out of it and keep it, then all the stacks move one seat around the table at the same time. Repeat until the stacks are empty, and each player has built a hand out of cards nobody else got to take.
Two sequences run the whole thing: one deals the stacks at the start of a round, and one passes them after each pick. The picking is the players' own business.
Setup
Raise Max Hand Size first. Open Table Settings, find the Hand section, and set Max Hand Size high enough for a full draft. The default is 5. A booster draft accumulates roughly 45 picks by the end, so a table left at the default stops accepting picks partway through the first stack, and it does it in the middle of live play rather than when you build the sequence.
Be precise about which action hits that limit, because it changes where you look when something goes wrong: drawing a card into your hand is capped, and passing a stack is not. Picks are what fill a hand up. Receiving a stack never fails on the cap, however many cards the stack holds, because the stack is one thing arriving rather than a hand growing.
Dealing sits in between: a seat whose hand is already full is skipped by the deal rather than failing it, so a table left at the default quietly starts opening stacks for some seats and not others. Setting the cap properly at the start avoids both symptoms.
The rest of the setup:
- Hands enabled on the table, in the same Hand section of Table Settings.
- Enough seats occupied for a draft to mean anything. Three is enough to see it work.
- One stack holding all the cards to be drafted, sitting on the table.
Dealing the stacks
Build a sequence in the Sequences panel Editor tab -- call it something like Open Stack -- with a single Deal Stacks step:
- Stack -- the source stack
- Tiles Per Stack -- how many cards each stack holds
- Deal To -- All Seats
- Face -- Face Down
Every occupied seat receives its own stack, held in hand, face down and private. The same thing is available as a Deal Stacks action in the Action Dock when you would rather start a round by hand.
The deal is all or nothing. If the source cannot give every occupied seat a full stack, no stack is dealt at all and the step tells you how many cards it needed against how many are left. That is what you will see on the round after the source runs dry, and it is deliberate: a draft with one player holding a short stack is worse than a draft that stops.
Note the difference from the neighbouring Deal to Hands step: that one hands out loose cards, Deal Stacks hands out whole stacks held in hand. A draft needs the whole stack to travel, not loose cards.
Picking
Each player selects the stack in their own hand and presses Draw. The card comes out of the stack and stays in that player's hand as an ordinary card. The stack keeps the rest of its contents, and nobody else can see what is inside it or how much is left.
Passing
Passing is its own sequence, because it runs once after every pick while the deal runs once per stack. Build a second sequence with a single Pass Stack step:
- Which Stack -- Seat
- From Seat -- All Seats
- Direction -- Left
Run it once and every seat's stack moves one place around the table simultaneously. With seats 1, 2 and 4 occupied and seat 3 empty, seat 1's stack goes to seat 2, seat 2's to seat 4, and seat 4's back to seat 1. Empty seats are skipped rather than swallowing a stack.
Only the stack travels. The cards each player has already picked stay with them. That is precisely what makes this a draft instead of a hand swap, and it is worth knowing before you wonder why your picks did not move.
Two ways to pass, and both name their direction
You can pass by hand as well. A player holding a stack selects it and presses Pass Left or Pass Right in the Action Dock, which moves that one stack the way the button says. The Pass Stack step does the same thing for every seat at once, with the direction set on the step.
Nothing is configured once for the whole table, so there is no hidden setting to check when a stack goes the wrong way -- the direction is always written on the thing you pressed or the step you ran. For which neighbour Left and Right actually land on, see which way Left and Right go.
A sequence can hold two passing steps with different directions and choose between them, which is what alternating direction builds on.
Trying it
Sit three seats. Run the deal sequence with Tiles Per Stack set to four. Have each seat draw one card, then run the passing sequence, and check three things:
- each player's stack changed hands, and the card they drew did not;
- from another seat, a neighbour's stack shows no contents and no count;
- after four rounds the stacks are empty.
That fourth round is where a draft that has not been finished off starts misbehaving. The sequence will happily keep running with no stacks left to move, which is the subject of stopping on the last card.