Meet Kida: why I built Draft Party

By Muhammad Zain Raza · 16 October 2026

If you watch anime Shorts, you've seen them. Someone pulls blind character cards into a team. Someone else bids $20 on a mystery character described by one cryptic clue. Two friends get $15 each to build the strongest fighter, then argue for ten minutes about who won.

I watched a lot of these. At some point the question changed from "who won?" to "where do I play this?" I wanted to do it with my own friends, some of them in other countries, not just watch strangers do it. So I looked. There were tier list makers, quiz sites, a few anime guessing games. Nothing that turned these formats into an actual party game you could play together. That gap is where Draft Party started, and I wanted to give something back to the two communities I spend the most time in: gamers and anime fans.

What Draft Party is

Draft Party is a free browser game for 2 to 10 friends. You make a party, share a 5-letter code, and play:

Role Draft: pull blind cards and slot them into roles from that anime's own power system
Mystery Auction: $20 each, bid on clues, names revealed at the end
Build a Character: $15 to buy one trait each, priced by how good that character really is at it
Who Am I?: three clues, hardest first, fastest answer takes the round
Anime Imposter: everyone sees the same character except one person
Daily Draft: the same seven cards for everyone, every day

There are 921 characters from 40 anime. Every character has a researched tier based on canon feats, official databooks where available, and their demonstrated abilities in the story. The goal isn't to rank characters by popularity. It's to give every draft a consistent starting point, even if the arguments never end. You can see them all on the tier list pages.

You can play on one phone passed around the table, or online from anywhere. No sign-up.

The Draft Party home screen with Play online and One phone buttons — The home screen, and the Naruto tier list the game uses.

The Naruto tier list, with S and A tier characters — The home screen, and the Naruto tier list the game uses.

Who Kida is

Kida, a pink trading card with an S badge

Kida is the little pink card with the S badge. She's Draft Party's resident anime critic, unofficial judge of your character picks, and the last person you want questioning your team composition. She's named after Masaomi Kida, and she gives the game a face and a personality beyond the cards themselves.

How I built it

The idea, the rules and the look are mine. I mapped out which Shorts formats should become modes, how a round stays fair, how online rooms should work so a friend in another country can join with one code, and how tiers get decided so the arguments are about picks, not about bad data. Getting six different game formats to feel fair, work across devices, and support friends playing remotely was a very different problem from simply making the screens look right.

I used Claude Code as a coding helper to build it fast. The first commit was on 9 October 2026 and the game went live a week later: 61 commits and about 15,700 lines of TypeScript.

For the curious: it runs on Cloudflare Workers, every online room is its own small server (a Durable Object), and the Android version is on its way to Google Play.

What's next

More anime, the Google Play release, and whatever you break.

I'm building this for the moments when your friends disagree about the strongest character, someone makes a ridiculous bid, and one bad pick becomes a running joke for the rest of the night. If you try Draft Party, I'd love to hear what works, what doesn't, and which character you think I've ranked completely wrong.

Play free at draftparty.me. Follow Kida on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube (@play.draftparty), and on LinkedIn.

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