Fantasy Draft Simulator
Seven rounds, seven bot rivals, one board. Draft by value over replacement, sim the season, and find out whether your process deserved the trophy.
What is the Fantasy Draft Simulator?
This is a complete fantasy-football draft, compressed to its strategic core. You and seven bot managers snake-draft seven rounds from a pool of ninety-six generated players — every one fictional, with a position, a point projection and a boom-or-bust temperament. Then the season runs: fourteen weeks of head-to-head matchups where every player's weekly score is drawn around their projection, and the standings decide whether your draft was as clever as it felt.
The teaching heart of the game is the little green number beside every name: value over replacement. Raw projections lie — a 300-point quarterback looks better than a 250-point running back until you notice that undrafted quarterbacks score 270 while undrafted running backs barely manage 150. The board computes this live, and learning to trust it over the big flashy projection is the single most transferable skill in fantasy sports. The players here are invented; the scarcity math is exactly the real thing.
How to Play
Value Over Replacement, The One Idea
Imagine the draft ends and your quarterback slot is empty. You are not doomed — you pick up the best quarterback nobody drafted, and in an eight-team league that leftover is often surprisingly decent. The points that leftover would score are your replacement level, and a drafted player's real value is how far they clear it. That subtraction — projection minus replacement at the same position — is VOR, and it reorders the whole board.
This is why experienced drafters take running backs early even when quarterbacks project more total points: the drop-off from the tenth-best quarterback to the twentieth is a gentle slope, while the same walk at running back falls off a cliff. Scarcity, not size, sets price. The simulator generates a fresh pool every draft, so the exact cliffs move — reading them each time, instead of memorising a sheet, is precisely the skill real drafts reward.
Things to Try
Four drafts, four lessons:
Draft by raw points once
Ignore VOR deliberately: take the biggest projection every turn. You will leave with three quarterbacks' worth of shine and a running-back room made of replacement parts — and the season sim will grade the experiment about how you would expect. Every fantasy player runs this experiment once; cheaper to run it here.
Then draft by VOR only
Same league, opposite rule: highest green number every time. Feel how it drags you toward scarce positions early and lets quarterbacks slide. Comparing the two final standings is the fastest VOR lesson available anywhere.
Build a floor team and a ceiling team
Volatility is a roster-construction dial. All-steady rosters post the same score every week — great until a shootout; all-boom rosters are coin-flip machines. The conventional wisdom — steady core, one or two lottery tickets — is testable here in ten minutes.
Respect the eight-pick gap
Drafting 4th of 8, your picks land on a steady rhythm — overall picks 4, 13, 20, 29 and so on — which means seven or more players leave the board between every two of your turns. Never plan around a specific player "coming back": if a positional cliff is one pick deep when your turn arrives, take it now, because the middle seat's curse is that everything you postpone gets drafted. Gap-planning is half of real draft craft.
Honest Limits
Every player is fictional and every projection is generated, which is a feature twice over: nothing here goes stale between seasons, and nothing borrows anyone's likeness or licence. The season model is deliberately simple — no injuries, no trades, no waiver wire, no bye weeks — because this is a game about the draft, and everything after pick 56 exists to grade the draft fairly. Scores are drawn independently each week around each player's projection, scaled by volatility; the bots draft with the same VOR math you see, softened by different amounts of noise, so beating them consistently means reading the board better, not knowing a trick they don't.
FAQ
Is the Fantasy Draft Simulator free?
Yes — the simulator is completely free and runs instantly in your browser. There is no download, no sign-up, and no in-app purchase.
Are these real players?
No — every player is fictional, generated fresh for each draft with a position, a projection and a boom-or-bust profile. That is deliberate: no licences, no stale rosters, and the strategy lessons transfer to any real league because they are about position scarcity, not about memorising names.
What is value over replacement?
A player's projected points minus the points of the best freely available player at the same position — the one you could roster without drafting anyone. It is the single most useful drafting idea: a 250-point running back can be worth more than a 300-point quarterback if replacement running backs score 150 while replacement quarterbacks score 270. The board shows it live for every player.
How does the season simulation work?
Fourteen weeks of head-to-head matchups. Each week every player produces a score drawn around their projection, scaled by their volatility — steady players cluster near it, boom-or-bust players swing wildly. Totals decide each matchup, and the final standings rank all eight teams by wins, then points.
Is my best season saved?
Yes. Your best final placement and win count are stored in your browser's local storage on this device. No account is needed, and clearing your browser data resets it.