Every manager needs players on their roster. By players, of course, we mean emailers. Each roster consists of three members of the campus community. These could be students, staff, or faculty. Anybody with a Swarthmore email address can be on a roster. Players are known only by their email address. Make sure you know what the email address of the player you want to sign is. Some popular choices might not have the address you expect.
So how do you get players onto your roster? Like many fantasy leagues, we have a draft, albeit a simulated one. Every manager ranks their top six emailers, we randomly generate a draft order, and then we snake through the order, assigning the most highly ranked available emailer to each successive manager until every manager has a full roster. We will configure the draft such that almost every player receives one of their top 3 picks. This means that players will be owned multiple times.
The best rosters don't just include famous names, they score the most points. Each manager has the option to select any word of their choosing for a communal 'word pool'. Every time a word in the word pool is used in a school-wide email sent by an emailer on your roster, you earn a point (if it's in the subject line, you earn two!). For instance, if Melissa Tier is on your roster and you think she'll have a lot to say about vegetables in the near future, you might select 'vegetable' as your word for the word pool. The word pool is communal so other managers will earn points when the word you submitted appears in one of their players' emails. You can select a common word such as the, but in doing so you will increase not just your own score, but those of other managers as well. Managers can change their selected word at any time, but the change goes into effect the following midnight.
The standings are updated every night. Points are cumulative, so each night every manager's score has an opportunity to increase.
You can sign or waive emailers at any time. Transfers go through at midnight after the day's scores are calculated. To sign an emailer, you need to drop one of your current emailers. This will open up a spot on your roster that can be filled by any emailer who is not already owned by other managers.