Draftsy
Fantasy sports · mobile · Alexey Sukhariev · Design engineer
Fantasy sports without the roster: Draftsy drafts teams, not players — and turns a whole season of it into a game you can finish in one evening. I designed the mobile product: the daily game end to end, the league, and the screens around them. It is live on the App Store and Google Play, running college football, pro football, college basketball and pro baseball.
You draft teams, not players
Fantasy sports usually ask for a roster, a rulebook and a season of maintenance. Draftsy removes the roster entirely: you pick clubs, real games decide the rest, and when your team scores, you score. A league runs 2–12 people across pro baseball, pro and college basketball and college football, and the app carries three ways to play — Traditional Draftsy, where you draft teams and score off their weekly performance; Perfect Picks, where you choose up to eight teams a week and predict which will earn the most; and Stacks on Stats, where you spread 100 tokens across statistical categories and predict whether your teams beat their own averages. Everything below is the daily Stacks on Stats game — the mode with the most decisions per minute.
The sport was the hard part
I am not the audience. A fantasy player does not bet on who wins; they bet on production against an average — whether a club beats its own numbers tonight. In baseball that is singles, strikeouts thrown, extra base hits; basketball and football count their own categories. Before a screen could be laid out I had to learn what those numbers mean to a fan, which of them a casual player can reason about, and how much of that arithmetic an interface is allowed to show before it stops being a game. Every decision further down comes out of that constraint.
One evening, seven screens
The daily game is a single uninterrupted move: choose a mode, see what the entry costs, pick a match day, follow three teams, stack chips on three of their stats, watch the real games score it, collect. Nothing branches, and nothing asks the player to come back later. The cost is visible from the second screen — 200 tokens in, 400 out — and the calendar says how much is on that day before you commit.
Where the game is actually played
One screen carries the whole decision: three stat bars per club, a running balance, and a sticky Cancel / Next bar. Two calls worth defending. The badge is the meter — instead of a confirm dialog, the club crest itself fills as the stake grows and locks blue with a check when the team is set, so the thing you are betting on is the thing that shows your bet. And the screen never scrolls while you decide: balance, bars and the action bar stay inside one thumb reach, because a player mid-decision should not have to hunt for the number they are spending.
The dashboard becomes the receipt
Real games run for hours, so players leave this screen open. It had to work as a live tracker and as the result — one surface, two states. While the night plays out it tracks three teams against the opponent’s. When the last game ends nothing hands off to a win page: the banner drops in from the top, the score counts up, the rank moves, the status turns Live → Final, and a claim bar rises from the bottom edge and stays there. In the working prototype that change is measured, not implied — score 0 → 5 000, rank 24 → 2.
One screen set, three leagues
Baseball, basketball and college football share one set of screens. Only what is league-specific changes: the artwork, the crests and the names of the stats. That is what makes the product expandable — a new league is a content job, not a redesign.
Two named people, a whole season
Beyond the daily game sits the league — the part that runs for weeks. The same league surface is redrawn through every stage the duel passes: waiting for a second player, the live draft room, a week with the score running, the playoff bonus, the trophy. Players never learn a new screen, only a new state of the one they already know.
Getting a second player in
A duel needs an opponent, so the invite had to be the lightest thing in the app: pick the league family, pick the length — daily, weekly or season — then invite by username from a searchable list, or hand over a QR code. The app guards the obvious mistake: make the same pick twice against the same opponent in a week and it stops you with a duplicate-pick warning instead of letting the entry through.
Tokens, and where they run out
Tokens pace the loop. A stake is spent in them, the balance sits on every screen of the flow, and the moment it runs short the app says so plainly and offers the shop rather than a dead end.
Where it lives
Draftsy is live on the App Store and Google Play, with college football, pro football, college basketball and pro baseball.
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