Stack. Bag. Spinner. Dealer.
The draft mechanism itself has a longer failure history than any single component in this post. It started as a stack, and the stack toppled. Then a bag — plain, unglamorous, and it just worked. Then I got ambitious: a lottery-ball spinner, which failed hard enough that it now sits in my house as a monument to the attempt rather than a working part of the game.
The tower came from Inspired Tabletop, a Chicago shop that makes tile towers and card dispensers for games like Carcassonne and Cascadia. One of them fits these tiles, and it is the first draft mechanism made for the job rather than borrowed for it.
Here's the part I didn't expect. Of everything on this table, the tower is the closest match to how the video game feels. When you draft in Blue Prince, the three room options don't appear; they slide in from the side of the screen and settle. The tower does the same thing. Press it and a tile shoots out and slides across the mat before it stops. It's a small motion, and I hadn't clocked how much of the game's rhythm lived in it until I saw the two side by side. All this time translating rules, and the most faithful thing in the box is a tile that skids.
The tower also reopened a closed question. Back in Post 26 I logged three ways to bring room rarity back and ruled out the obvious one, separate piles, because sorting and handling four stacks by hand was the bookkeeping that got rarity cut in the first place. In Playtest 1, Mike asked for a dealer that could handle rarity on its own, and I told him that would take custom hardware. It takes four of these, in four colors. Same 110 tiles, delivered in different ratios: by rank, or as curated mixes, which is also the beginning of a novice mode and an advanced mode built from the same box. Whether the sorting is still the hurdle is the open question. It's logged as Model D, and it waits until real players have said whether the flat bag is the problem. That's its own post.
The other thing this tower answered, sideways: I've spent a while trying to define what "fun" even means for this project — how to measure it, how to design toward it on purpose. Turns out the dealer tower is just plain fun as an object, independent of the actual game. Friends who weren't even playing Blue Prince Board Game wanted to press the button and watch a card come out. That's not nothing. Sometimes fun isn't a property of the ruleset — it's a property of a good mechanism, and you find it by building the mechanism, not by defining the word.
Fun isn't a property of a ruleset. It's a property of a good mechanism, and you find it by building the mechanism, not by defining the word.