Draftsy

One rainy afternoon, Bluster the young deer came in looking glum and dripping. "I've lost to the same player three times in a row," he said. "Every single time, they find my Moonstone fast. It's like they can see through the pieces."

Draftsy asked to see his last three setups. She unrolled them side by side on her big table and smoothed them flat. Then she tapped the same spot on each one. "Look."

In all three, the Moonstone was in the back-left corner, with brambles on either side of it.

Bluster stared. "I didn't even notice I did that."

"You didn't," said Draftsy. "But they did. When you play someone once, they have to search. When you play them three times and always put the Moonstone in the same place, they don't need to search any more. They just walk there. Your habit did their thinking for them."

Bluster felt his ears go hot. It is embarrassing to find out you have a pattern you couldn't see yourself, especially when someone else has been using it against you. But Draftsy didn't make a big thing of it. She simply reached for a fresh, blank roll of paper.

"So we change it," she said. "Not randomly, though. Random is just a different kind of mistake. Every setup still has to make sense. The Moonstone still needs guarding, the runners still need room to run, the badgers still need to be somewhere useful. But the Moonstone moves. Sometimes left, sometimes right, sometimes in the middle of the back row. Sometimes the brambles sit with it. Sometimes they guard a decoy somewhere else."

They drew three new blueprints together, each one sensible and each one different from the others.

In the next game, Bluster's opponent marched straight to the back-left corner, the way they always had. They found a 6 waiting there, and they lost a piece finding out. Bluster's Moonstone was on the far right, tucked behind a 4, and it stayed hidden all game.