Auctions: Bidding on Fun, Part One

Knucklebones: March, 2007This is a reprint of an article written in October, 2006 for first publication in the March, 2007 issue of the now-defunct Knucklebones magazine. Because of its origins, this article is more introductory and (hopefully) more polished than many of my online writings. Despite the original source of this article, this blog is in no way associated with Jones Publishing or Knucklebones Magazine.


“And what I am bid for this fine replica Napoleonic sword? 5? 5? I have 5. 10? Do I hear 10? 10. 15? 15 to the lady in red. 20? Do I hear 20? How about 25?I have two 25s!”

Auctions are an element of modern life, from the cheap knockoffs being sold en masse at your local flea market, to the sale of Picasso’s “Dora Maar with Cat” last year, auctioned by Sotheby’s for $95 million. The ever-popular eBay is an auction service as are the zShops at Amazon, which jointly lower their prices until they find a sale point.

The point of an auction is simple: to allow multiple buyers to compete fairly for the purchase of a limited good — or alternatively to allow multiple sellers to compete fairly for a sale to limited purchasers. Auctions quickly achieve balance in a world of unequal supply and demand.

Because of the innate competition that they embody, auctions are also great systems to include in games. A few American classics feature them, but they’ve become even more popular among modern designer games.

The Purpose of Auctions

Auctions are increasingly popular in modern games. And, for good reason: they can improve the design of a game in several different ways.

Reiner Knizia is one of the most prolific game designers in the world, and that includes numerous auction games, possibly more than any other. Some of his top auction games are Amun-Re, Beowulf: The Legend, High Society!, Merchants of Amsterdam, Modern Art, Medici, Palazzo, Ra, Taj Mahal, and Tower of Babel.

Knizia goes straight to the core of auctions when he says, “Auctions are a fantastic way to introduce interaction into a game.  They involve everybody at the same time, which is particularly relevant for games which have many players, as any waiting times are kept to a minimum.” Bruno Faidutti, a French designer of over a half-dozen auction games succinctly says much the same: “I like interaction in games, and auctions are always very interactive.”

Faidutti believes that auctions also introduce new insights into games. He says, “auctions force players to evaluate the value of different possibilities … and often give them interesting hints on … their values for the other players.” In other words, auctions allow players to consider the strategies being used by everyone in a game.

Knizia offers a final benefit of auctions to games. He says that they help games run smoother: “Auctions … have the advantage of being self-balancing.  This means that if all the players are rich then they can bid a lot and money is taken out of the game.  If all the players are poor then the bids will be low but the players will still get the rewards. This makes a game very robust and introduces a nice competitive element.”

With auctions introducing interaction, strategy, and balance to games, it’s not surprising that so many designs have used them over the last twenty years, in an increasing number of varieties.

English Auctions

The most common type of auction found in games is the “English” auction in which players openly bid gradually increasing amounts for some good. It’s how most real-life auctions work, from the flea market to Sotheby’s, and it’s how traditional games like Monopoly and Masterpiece arranged their auctions.

Traditionally English auctions are totally freeform, with participants yelling out prices while an auctioneer tries to manage the event. However more recent designer games have restricted the manner in which these auctions are conducted to tighten up players’ decisions, and to make sure that every time they make a bid it’s meaningful (also in the process speeding up games, because in a well-designed game players spend less time on irrelevant bids).

Many constrained English auction games use “around-the-table” auctions, where players bid in turn until everyone but one player has dropped out. Some go a step further and implement “once-around” auctions where each player gets just one opportunity to make a bid. Some auction games restrict the increments in which bids can be made, perhaps even slowly increasing those bid increments as the price increases. Others restrict what items you can bid on, depending on what you own or what you’ve bid on in the past.

Reiner Knizia’s High Society! (Uberplay, $19.95) is a good example of a short and simple English auction game. Each player receives a handful of money in unique denominations, then uses that to bid on variously valued items that come up for auction in a random order. There are a few “catches” that make this 15-minute or so game unique and interesting: once you’ve put down money as part of a bid you can’t make change, but must either add new money or else withdraw; and you never quite know when the game is going to end.

Sealed Auctions

The nearly silent sealed auctions are quite different from the usually rambunctious English auctions. Here participants assess the value of a good, then each make a secret offer for it. The results are all revealed simultaneously, and the highest bidder wins. In real life home purchases are usually conducted by sealed auction when there are multiple interested parties, though with a few special “rules”: in home sales there is an asking price which acts as a guideline for all bidders, and real estate agents will sometimes “hint” at appropriate prices by telling bidders how many other participants are bidding.

One of the advantages of sealed auctions over English auctions is that they provide the opportunity for additional types of gameplay. Bruno Faidutti notes that sealed auctions “can induce bluffing.” He explains, “That’s what I tried with Fist of Dragonstones, which is only auctions but, in fact, is more about bluffing than about evaluating.”

Fist of Dragonstones (Days of Wonder, $24.95) is a fanciful sealed auction game where people bid on the services of dragons, wizards, and other denizens of a magic land. During each round of bidding each player has approximately the same amount of money to bid and has to figure out what they should bid and when, so as not to waste their meager supplies on losing bids — because the money is spent whether you win or not.

Dutch Auctions

Dutch auctions — named for the method used to sell tulips in Holland for the last century — are much more rare than English or sealed auctions. Here a good is offered up for sale at a very high price, and then the auctioneer slowly lowers that price until someone agrees to purchase it.

Dutch auctions are a bit hard to model in games since they require an impartial auctioneer who must decide which of several bidders, all shouting out a bid at the same time, “won”. Because the auctioneer is inevitably a player, this can be a real conflict of interest.
Nonetheless, a few games have managed to include Dutch auctions in their designs. Reiner Knizia takes the most obvious approach in Merchants of Amsterdam (Rio Grande Games, $39.95). An auction clock counts prices down, and when a player hits the stop button on the clock, he gets the price shown. Bruno Faidutti uses a very different method in Queen’s Necklace (Days of Wonder, $24.95): prices decrease each time a player takes a turn, and only the active player can make a purchase at any time. Finally Henry Stern’s Vegas Showdown (Avalon Hill, $45.00) ticks prices down between rounds of play, but then players can bid those prices back up if multiple players become interested in the same item (thus combining Dutch and English methods).

Poker Auctions

English, sealed, and Dutch auctions differ in how participants bid on a good. However auctions can also differ in how those participants pay for a good. In particular, some auctions force everyone to pay their bid no matter who won. This is a great game mechanic because it forces hard decisions every time you bid. It doesn’t have an equivalent in real-life auctions, but it is similar to another game: Poker. There players make bids on whether they think they can win, and one player eventually collects everyone else’s bids.

Faidutti’s Fist of Dragonstones already offered one example of this type of play. However unsealed English auctions with Poker-style payment are a more common example of this mechanic. They force players to think about how they’re bidding, how much they’re going to lose, and whether their money already invested should have any bearing on how much more they’re willing to commit.

One of the best examples of a Poker auction is the recently re-released Taj Mahal (Rio Grande Games, $39.95) by Reiner Knizia. Here players bid cards in several suits in order to win a variety of prizes, but as is typical in the genre, every card bid is lost. Getting into a bidding war with an opponent is often the fastest way to lose the game.

Conclusion

Auction games have come a long way in the last twenty years. Modern designers like Knizia, Faidutti, and Stern now build very carefully designed auction systems into their games which increase interaction, strategy, and balance.

And, they’re usually fun too. Whether you’re offering elephants to an Indian raj or bidding on tulips in Amsterdam, you can momentarily live in a world of high spending and forget the worries of the day.


Author’s Note: The version of this article that was published in Knucklebones also included mini-reviews of about a dozen auction games — all displayed in boxes throughout the article. Since I find boxes harder to display within the constraints of this blog, I’ve saved all the mini-reviews for a follow-up article. —SA, 9/4/12

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