Draft Animals

Draft Animals is a daily draft. Six rounds, three cards a round, and everyone in the world gets the same cards today. You pick a five-a-side football team of real animals (a keeper, two defenders, two forwards and a sub), and then a 17-match season plays out, match by match, while a commentator calls the goals. The question is the one the whole genre asks: can you go undefeated?

The stats are real, and the numbers and their Wikipedia source are on the back of every card. Pace comes from top speed, power from body mass and bite, reach from size, and each position leans on one of them: keepers use reach, defenders power, forwards pace. So the hippo (1,500 kg, 4 m long) is a wall in goal, the cheetah scores, and the monarch butterfly is a brave choice anywhere. Chemistry starts the arguments. Wolves play better as a pack, prey animals get nervous next to a predator (the zebra does not enjoy sharing a dressing room with the lion), and the capybara calms everyone down. The season's night games and rain are shown while you draft, because the owl loves a night match and the eagle can't fly in the rain.

There are only 729 possible drafts from a day's cards, so when your season ends the game plays every one of them and tells you where yours ranked, the best draft of the day, and the one pick that would have changed your season most. You get one official draft a day, unlimited practice, and a sticker album that fills only from the daily.

The idea came from Jeff, out of the 2026 wave of "same draw for everyone, can you go 82-0?" games, which all use real athletes or Pokémon. Real animals belong to nobody, and everyone already has an opinion about who would win. It's plain JavaScript in the browser. The 69 sticker portraits were made with FLUX.1 [schnell], and the commentator and the crowd with ElevenLabs. The promo above was filmed from the real game, on a day when a hippo in goal leads the one draft of 729 that goes 17-0.