Desert Island Draft: Survival

You are stranded on a desert island. You get ten items. The rest of your life depends on which ten, and on what you knew before the wreck.

DESERT ISLAND DRAFT is the survival card game version of the argument you have already had at dinner: what would you bring to a desert island? Except this one keeps score. Draft ten cards, two at a time. Keep one, forever. Pick the disaster you think you built for. Pick your one piece of luck. Then the rest of your castaway life plays out in front of you: the clock eats the years, the log fills in with what actually happened, and a grave marker comes up out of the sand. Days get a plank. Months get a cairn. Decades get a mausoleum. You will know how it went before you read a word.

NOTHING IS ONLY ONE THING

A guitar is also six steel strings and a dry wooden box. A toolbox is a rat-proof pantry, and propped on a stick, a trap. Golf clubs are a spear rack. A coffin holds eighty liters of anything, and it floats. Every item in the deck has more uses than it admits to, and finding them is the game.

IF YOU NEVER LEARNED IT, YOU CANNOT DO IT

You are not a survival expert. You are a person with a job and a gym membership who ended up shipwrecked anyway. Fishing, foraging, trapping, curing, distilling: all of it depends on what you knew before you washed ashore, and a novice with a gill net owns some very nice shade. Between runs you learn: nearly twenty skills, three levels deep, and the difference between knowing and mastering is the difference between a hard first winter and a long, strange, happy life with a goat you have strong opinions about.

YOU WILL DIE. THAT IS THE CONTENT.

Thirst. Slow starvation. Scurvy, the oldest sailor's death there is. The sun, eventually. The wrong berries. Boredom. All work and no play is fatal here. Over a hundred ways to go, and the island keeps a graveyard of every one you've met. Every death has a cause, every cause has a story, and the results screen tells it with complete honesty and no mercy: what you lived on, what sat in the sand because you never learned to use it, and the one decision that cost you most.

THE STRATEGY PART

Three scores: how long you survived, how well you actually lived, and Mastery, which grades every run against the best possible play of the exact cards you were dealt. A bad deck played perfectly beats a good deck played badly. It measures decisions, not luck, and it is very hard to argue with.

• A full castaway life in 3 to 5 minutes: draft, wreck, verdict

• Over 70 items, islands from gentle to genuinely hostile, nearly 20 skills

• Over 100 secret item combinations to discover, each with its own coin

• Real simulation underneath: water, food, shelter, morale, luck

• A career that carries over: unlock islands, earn cards by deed, master skills

• Offline, single player, one hand, no timers

• Free. No ads.

Ten cards. One island. The rest of your life. However long that is.