What you end up with
A booster draft with two things layered on top of it. First, a Rochester-style twist: each player opens their own stack to the whole table right after it is dealt, so everyone can see what is in every stack as it travels around -- not just the seat currently holding it. Second, turn tracking: the table keeps a rotating marker that a step in the middle of the round can read to ask "is it this seat's turn," even though picking itself stays simultaneous the same way the plain booster draft's picking does.
Three sequences run the round: one deals and opens the stacks, one runs a pick-and-pass, and a third, optional one shows the turn marker actually being read by an Only If.
Setup
Start from the booster draft's own setup -- raise Max Hand Size in Table Settings before running a single pick, for the reason the booster draft's setup section already covers in full; this page does not repeat it.
Add turn tracking on top. Open Table Settings, go to the Players tab, and open the Turn Tracking section. Turn it on, and set Turn Direction to Left -- the same Left as the pass direction below, see which way Left and Right go. See Turn Tracking for what turn order means, who may change it by hand, and what happens to it when a seat joins, leaves, or switches -- this page only covers the two steps that touch it.
Sequence A: open the stacks
Build a sequence called something like Open Stack Round, run by hand from the Sequences panel at the start of every round, with two steps:
- Deal Stacks -- Stack: the source stack; Tiles Per Stack: how many cards each stack holds; Deal To: All Seats; Face: Face Down. Same step, same fields, as the booster draft's deal -- see Deal Stacks for the all-or-nothing refusal rule if you have not read it there already.
- Change Turn -- Turn Action: Set; Set Turn To: Acting Player. Whoever runs this sequence becomes the seat the turn marker points at for the round that is about to start. See Change Turn for what Turn Action Set does and why it requires turn tracking to be on.
Then every player opens their own stack. Deal Stacks always deals a private stack -- Face Down here is about the stack's own printed face, not who can read its contents. Right after the deal, each player selects the stack that just landed in their hand and presses Open in the Action Dock. This is a per-player, per-stack action, not a sequence step -- there is no automated way to open every stack in one press, the same way there is no automated way to press Draw for a player. See Opening a stack to the table for exactly what Open changes, how it looks, and that it is immediate and undoable.
Sequence B: everyone picks, then pass
Build a second sequence, run by hand once per pick, with three steps:
- Wait for All Seats -- Message: something like "Waiting for every seat to finish picking"; Timeout (ms): the default (120000, two minutes) is fine to start with; On Timeout: Release and continue.
- Pass Stack -- Which Stack: Seat; From Seat: All Seats; Direction: Left. Same configuration as the booster draft's pass. The open flag carries with the stack: an open stack stays open for whoever it lands with next, so a stack opened at the start of the round stays visible to the whole table for the rest of it, without needing to be re-opened after every pass.
- Change Turn -- Turn Action: Advance. Moves the turn marker to the next occupied seat in ring order, the same direction the pass just used.
Why the barrier is what makes this different from the plain booster draft. Without step 1, the pass step runs the instant someone presses the sequence, whatever each seat has or has not done yet -- a player who has not finished looking at their stack loses it out from under them the moment a neighbor (or the sequence author) is faster. Wait for All Seats holds the whole round open until every occupied seat has pressed Ready, so the pass always happens after everyone has picked, never mid-pick. See Wait for All Seats for the full behavior, including what it does when a seat leaves mid-wait -- covered again below in Boundary conditions rather than restated here.
Running it
Sequence B cannot be bound to a reactive trigger, and it cannot be called as a sub-sequence.Wait for All Seats is a prompt step -- the same category as Prompt Confirm, Prompt Number,
Prompt Choose, and Select via Prompt -- and every prompt step is refused in both of those two
places, because a sequence that can suspend to ask a player something cannot also be something a
reactive trigger fires unattended or a parent sequence calls and waits on synchronously. Run
Sequence B by hand from the Sequences panel, or from a button, once per pick.
Using the turn in a condition
A turn-based step in the middle of the round can now ask whose turn it is. Build a small "Take a bonus tile" sequence with one step -- say, Draw from Stack against a shared bonus pile -- and give that step an Only If:
- Subject: Whose Turn
- Seat Target: Acting Player
- Operator: is true
This reads as Turn is on Acting Player in the condition preview. The operator is is true
(or is false), never a numeric or text comparison -- Whose Turn resolves to a yes/no answer
("is the turn on this seat"), not a number or a name, so a greater-than or equals comparison is not
offered for it. Getting the operator wrong here would describe a condition a designer cannot
actually build. See Whose Turn in the Subjects table for the full
list of seat targets it accepts.
Boundary conditions
The barrier waits on the whole ring, and a player leaving mid-pick never strands the round. The rules for how it handles a seat departing, a ring emptying out, and its timeout are the same ones it follows everywhere else. See Wait for All Seats for the complete behavior list.
The turn follows the same ring-change rules as everywhere else it is used, not a special set for this recipe. See when the ring changes for the full table.
The open flag has its own transition rules, separate from the turn's. A stack released to the table (nobody holding it) always clears the flag; a copy of a stack always starts private. Neither of those situations arises in the ordinary flow of this recipe, but see Opening a stack to the table for the full five-row table if a round ever ends with a stack abandoned on the table instead of passed.
What this recipe cannot express today. The turn marker here is a rotating indicator, not a gate on who is allowed to pick -- every seat can always press Ready on the barrier regardless of whose turn it is, because the barrier waits on the whole ring and has no seat-targeting field of its own. A draft where only the active player may act (turn-gated picking, one seat at a time) is not what this recipe builds; it builds a simultaneous-pick, fully open draft with a turn marker available for anything else that wants one. Turn-gated picking, auto-alternating pass direction, and non-adjacent passing are all deliberately unbuilt today.