Draft and Write Records Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Draft and Write Records, a draft and write board game published by Inside Up Games. In Draft and Write Records, players will be creating their own production company.

Everyone has their preferred sub-type of “X-and-write” game by now. Dice or cards, numbers or shapes, feather-light or lead-heavy—there are so many of these games that it’s easy to get hyper-specific about which of them appeal to you. With so many options out there already, it can be hard for a new X-and-write game to stand out without some kind of twist on the familiar formula

Enter Draft & Write Records, a (you’ll never guess) draft-and-write game for 1-6 players. It plays best with 2-3 players, and plays in about 30-60 minutes.

In traditional X-and-write fashion, Draft & Write Records is all about filling in boxes and triggering bonuses to fill in more boxes. Each round, players draw a hand of five cards from the deck, and play one card from hand each turn, passing the remaining cards to their neighbor after doing so.

Roughly half the cards in the deck let you fill in a space in one of your sheet’s six(!) ancillary areas, which will eventually provide bonuses (i.e. endgame points or bonus actions) when enough spaces are filled. However, the other cards in the deck allow you to hire Crew, which are the literal and figurative centerpiece of the game.AssYour player sheet’s Crew section comprises twelve Crew slots: one Lead Singer, four Musicians, three Production members, and four Backstage members. When you play a Crew card, you fill in its point value and four skills into a slot of the same type. When two adjacent Crew members share a skill, it also unlocks a Harmony, which lets you fill in a space in the Harmony section of your sheet, potentially triggering even more bonuses. Each unfilled Crew slot costs you points at the end of the game, so it is important to fill those slots as quickly as possible.

At the end of each round, players get the chance to claim goals. Four goals are always