Tag: Auctioning

Please Note: This is the second of two articles on auctioning as a tabletop game mechanic. The first article may be accessed here.

Last week’s article dove into various possible options for implementing an auctioning mechanic into your board or card game. Please comment with your thoughts on auctioning mechanics and how you have used them in the past!

No discussion of tabletop game mechanics is complete without also considering cautions and potential problems to keep in mind when implementing each mechanic, and this article dives into those cautions and considerations with the many auctioning mechanisms that can be utilized.

After looking over these thoughts below, please share your own ideas and breakthroughs with auctioning in games!

Important Considerations with Auctioning

Auctioning is a great way to distribute resources and invite strategic planning in your games. However, after deciding to include auctioning in board and card games, one of the important issues to consider is what to do with the funds that are raised. Many games simply return funds to the bank or stockpile, but there are several other options that will also affect players’ bidding practices, as shown below.

• Some games, including Chicago Express, invest the funds raised into players’ shared train companies as the main source of money they can use to expand throughout the game.
• Other games such as Dealer’s Choice have players auction their own items and keep the funds raised.
• Another option that is sometimes used is to redistribute funds raised among the losing players so that players earn money for future auctions by losing current auctions.

At times, items may be auctioned that players do not want to purchase at the current asking price. Rather than drag out the game or leave unwanted items in the market, some games include some kind of control that decreases or reduces the price of items if no player chooses to bid on it. Other times, reducing the price is built into the auctioning mechanism, as in auctions where the price goes in reverse, from a high price to a low until someone is willing to purchase at the asking price. Blind auctions with no minimum or a low minimum also help ensure that all items are purchased at some price point.

Board and card games that use unconventional auctioning, especially blind auctions, should also have a built-in way to deal with ties and resolve equal bids. This might include taking into account a secondary ranking mechanism, requiring tied players to re-bid, requiring tied players to add to their current bid, or discarding the item and removing it from the game.

As mentioned above, creative approaches can be taken to incentivize strategically losing bids, such as compensating losing players or requiring players to win or lose a specific number of bids. Many other variations can be added to auctions to make them interesting and unique.

Cautions and Tips for Using Auctioning

Care should be taken when using auctioning in games that the auctioning does not extend the game by too much. In some cases, if too many decisions are affected by the auction it can lead to overthinking and detract from other mechanics within the game.

 Related to this, players’ feelings and emotions should be taken into consideration. Some auctions, especially timed auctions and Dutch Auctions (descending price) can bring a lot of tension and stress. Other auctions that do not play a core role in the game might be tedious and off-putting. In either case, such a problem might reflect badly on the game or make it unpleasant to play; while on the other hand, some players might enjoy decisions like that. Because of this, designers should carefully consider what emotions and interactions you hope to encourage for the game, then carefully design and test auctions to match the intended choices and gameplay.

However you decide to include them, auctions can be a great opportunity to engage players in your games. Let me know what new ideas you have seen or tried with board and card game auctions!

What are some concerns you have with auctioning being used as a board or card game mechanic? What are some ways to mitigate any potential problems? Please comment below with your thoughts!

Please Note: This is the second of two articles on auctioning as a tabletop game mechanic. The first article may be accessed here.

Please Note: This is the first of two articles on auctioning as a tabletop game mechanic. The second article may be accessed here.

Auctions are fun. Have you ever sat in an auction, curious to see what deals you can find, only to realize that you can’t even understand the auctioneer? Worse, you may have innocently reached up to scratch your head in confusion, only to hear as the first legible word, “Sold!” and realize that you had inadvertently bought the old creaky rocker in the corner for a greatly inflated price.

While auctioning in board and card games is usually much less error-prone and much more informal, auctioning can be a great way to provide risk-reward tradeoffs in a more strategic way than dice rolling does.

Take a few minutes to review the article below for an overview of some of the many ways that auctioning can be utilized as an engaging tabletop game mechanism in the games you design and create. Hopefully this sparks some additional ideas, which I would love to hear about in the comments below!

Overview of the Auctioning Mechanic

Auctioning has taken many different forms in a wide variety of games, and can lead to some very fun and sometimes stressful experiences. Usually only the winning bidder receives benefits from bidding, but sometimes the losing bidders are partially compensated with something of lesser value. The Parker Brothers designed several early games with auctioning mechanisms that are still popular today, including Monopoly and Rook.

Monopoly uses one of the more straightforward types of auctioning, where if a player doesn’t want to pay the asking price for a property, he or she must put the property up for auction and place the starting bid. The next player may either pass or place a higher bid, and this continues until one player has placed a bid that no other player is willing to increase, and the player with the winning bid pays the full price. This is often referred to as an English Auction, and is quite common. Many games establish a rule that once players pass once, they are out of the auction and may not bid again, which helps encourage continued participation.

Rook has a similar auction, but with a twist. Players are in teams, but may not communicate with each other. Bids are constrained to increments divisible by five in order to speed up the bidding phase, and players must bid or pass in turn order, though in other games bids may be constrained in other ways. Players’ bids are predictive, and each team guesses at how many points their team will make based on the contents of their hand. In addition, in Rook the players bid on an ambiguous prize, without knowing the cards they will receive for the winning bid. This sometimes leads to interesting situations, such as team members bidding against each other to be able to end up in the best possible position. Skull King employs a similar predictive bidding mechanism, but players are penalized for ending up either over or under their bids, and must hit them exactly.

Auction mechanics can take many other forms, including the following as listed below:

• Dutch Auctions: These reverse the typical flow by gradually decreasing the price until any player is willing to accept the goods at the current asking price. This can add a lot of tension as players hope to get the items at the lowest price possible, but want to bid before the other players for fear of losing the bid.
• Multiple Lots: Sometimes players bid on either multiple items in a lot, or multiple lots at a time in order to auction more items more quickly. Many times this bidding takes place silently, and players privately place bids for all lots at once. Private bids are also used in other contexts, but may sometimes lead to a tie, which must be resolved. Other times, players might be assigned a lot based on their position in a single bid.
• Use of Funds Raised: Usually the funds raised are returned to the bank or common pool, but at times the money paid by the winning bidder is distributed among the losers of the bid, or may even be paid to a single player, such as the one with the lowest bid or the one taking a pre-specified place in the bidding.
• Other Possible Constraints: Often bids are constrained in various ways including those mentioned above, but auctions and bids may also be constrained in the following ways:
  • By the bidding going only once around and giving each player one chance only to place a bid.
  • By placing an item on a board space representing a fixed bid amount, which fixes both the amounts that may be bid and the number of bids that may be placed.
  • By utilizing bidding phases that do not occur at set intervals, but are rather initiated by other events, or even by the players themselves, as is the case in Chicago Express.
  • By restricting bidding to only players that perform some kind of task of dexterity or meet some other condition within the game.
  • By having bidding tokens represent a fixed amount, and requiring winning players to pay an amount equal to the number of bids placed on the lot.
  • By replacing items won in a bid with the items used to bid for them.
  • By putting funds paid for a winning bid into use within the game, whether they are distributed to the other players or put somewhere else. For example, Chicago Express invests the funds raised from the winning bid into the train company under consideration, which sometimes leads players to bid more than required to fund their companies.

What are some interesting ways you have seen auctioning be used as a board or card game mechanic? What are some other ideas for how it can be used? Please comment below with your thoughts!

Please Note: This is the first of two articles on auctioning as a tabletop game mechanic. The second article may be accessed here.