I like draft games. Particularly character based draft games. Or rather, I like watching people play character based draft games. I’ve never actually played in one. A character based draft game is where people pick a genre or story or series, and then select characters from it to form a team. Then, usually, you’re expected to explain how the team overcomes a series of obstacles presented by an independent referee, and if you’re feeling competitive, everybody votes on whose team did best.
Or if you’d prefer someone else to do all the obstacle calculations for you, you could play fantasy football, which is the exact same game, where the characters are limited to real life football players, and the obstacles are simulated football games that are played out automatically with other people in your game. I love the term fantasy football, because it draws attention to the geekier aspects of being a football fan. And, as the joke that is almost over done has pointed out, football fans are supposedly the antithesis of geeks/nerds/fans. Many people have pointed out the similarities between playing fantasy football and playing board games, or drafting games, or even dungeons and dragons.
I bring up these topics because of a post made by Dan Wells on his blog, Fearful Symmetry. He has a passing familiarity with football, like I do, and decided to make up his own team, but instead of pulling from the usual set of characters, he pulled from characters that fantasy fans might find more familiar, like say Jedi, wizards, or aliens. This makes for a particularly humorous post which I invite you all to read:
Fantasy Football: finally a sport I can understand by Dan Wells [FearfulSymmetry.net]