Every month I go to a PortLUG meeting. There are usually impressive and inspiring MOCs to see and assorted business and gossip to pass around. The highlight for me is almost always the festival of sorting and treachery that is the draft.

For those who aren’t familiar with the idea of drafting Lego sets, it is a great way to get a large number of specific elements and get to know your fellow builders. Each participant provides a Lego set that has been previously agreed upon. The sets are then sorted together by element so that all of the identical elements are together. Our LUG has a collection of sorting cups in various sizes to facilitate.

Once all of the elements are sorted into cups, we usually group the cups by color. This makes it easier to select supporting pieces. More than once have I returned home with awesome pieces in an uncommon color to discover that I don’t have any other elements in that color, making them kind of useless.

Once all of this is set up, each person draws a numbered lot and we arrange ourselves around the table in ascending numerical order. Then the picks begin. Starting with whoever drew the lowest lot, each person takes turns drawing a single cup of bricks. Once we reach the highest number, that person draws twice and the choices progress back down to the bottom. We yo-yo like this until all of the cups have been chosen.

The draws are often accompanied by banter and commentary from the peanut gallery. There is always some friendly competition for certain elements (in fact, one of the keys to choosing a fun draft set is to have elements that appeal to many different types of builder, thereby increasing the likelihood that everyone will walk away with good stuff). By the end there is light-hearted grumbling as people draw cups of less useful elements (how often do you need a dozen steering wheels).

Our last draft set was Sunshine Harvest. The Friends theme provides a lot of beautiful colors and interesting elements, so we tend to draft a lot of them. This time around we had ten people drafting eleven sets (one guy brought two, thus he got two picks). I didn’t get the greatest lot (10), but I still managed to draw some great parts.

The set contained 233 pieces (not including some of the extras), which is a nice price-per-piece. After the draft, I had 220 pieces. Still a nice number. Of those, I had some nice uncommon bricks and large quantities of some (multiples of eleven)!

Drafting is a lot of fun.  I always come away with interesting and sometimes unexpected elements spur me to build things that I hadn’t thought of building before.

Have fun and build more!