Auctions have faded a bit from the euro-scene. They were a prime euro-mechanic during the genre’s youth, but pure auction games like High Society (1995) and For Sale (1997) soon turned into auction hybrids like Amun-Re (2003). Then auctions became just another mechanic — a part of more complex games like Age of Steam (2002) — and even that has mostly disappeared in the modern day.
There’s one prime exception: a style of auction that has survived well into the present day. It’s called the Dutch Auction, and I think it’s survived better than standard auctions because it can be so tightly integrated into a game that you might not even realize it’s an auction at all.
In a Dutch Auction, prices on an item drop until someone decides to purchase it. That’s its power: there’s only one bid, none of this round-after-round silliness that can go on forever. If done well, it can look like a purchase — not an auction at all; the price just happens to drop as part of the normal flow of turns. And that’s how some of the best Dutch Auction games of recent years have done it.
I’ve listed five of them below, arranged in ascending order of elegance.. By chance it’s also a climb toward in the modern day. This isn’t unusual in designs: I think it shows how the use of the mechanic has matured over time.
5. Merchants of Amsterdam (2000)
Merchants of Amsterdam (2000) is a bit on-the-nose. It’s a Dutch Auction game where there’s a literal clock that counts down prices. When someone likes a price they smack the clock (poor clock!) and get to make the purchase at the current price. There’s nothing wrong with this, per se, but the Dutch Auction isn’t elegantly integrated into the structure of a game; instead it’s a game with a Dutch Auction in it.
But it’ll also serve as our starting point.
4. Queen’s Necklace (2003)
Queen’s Necklace was my personal introduction to Dutch auctions in gaming. It uses what I think of as the prototypical methodology for incorporating a Dutch Auction into a game: items are put up for sale (here, cards that represent characters, gems, and rings) and those items have a variety of prices marked on them. A marker is placed on an item at the highest price, but that price drops over time — usually at the start of a round (or turn) of play.
With that said, the timing of the auction in Queen’s Necklace is unusual because players have individual turns, and they can only buy items on their turn. Since a card only has four potential prices, that literally means that each player in a four-player game will only have one opportunity to buy each card.
So, though the mechanism is technically a Dutch Auction, it doesn’t act like a Dutch Auction for any individual player. Instead, a player tactically looks at all of the card prices on his turn, decides which items are the “right price”, and buys those.
None of this is a complaint: Queen’s Necklace offers an example of taking a Dutch Auction and using it in a different way, which can have merits all its own.
3. Vegas Showdown (2005)
At first glance, Vegas Showdown‘s Dutch Auctions look a lot like those in Queen’s Necklace. Items are put out for sale each turn (here, parts of a casino), and they start at a certain (high) price, but after each round of play, everything that wasn’t purchased drops in price.
The first difference is that the players simultaneously bid on items. The second difference is that they actually bid; they don’t just pay a set purchase price, but instead use that price as a minimum, moving up in price from there. This means that Vegas Showdown is an odd combination of a Dutch Auction (to determine starting bid) and a regular auction (to determine final bid). Though an item often is sold for its starting price (as determined by the Dutch Auction price drops), sometimes it goes for far more than that because a “bidding frenzy” ensues.
The methodology of Vegas Showdown also creates some interesting brinksmanship. Because money is very tight, if you can bid on an item first, you might be able to cut your opponents out of the bidding … but maybe you want to wait for that item’s price to drop lower in the hope of getting a better deal … but then they might have more money to oppose you!
Though the price dropping in Vegas Showdown was still very traditional — with a clear red disk showing those decreases — it was one of the first games to put its Dutch Auction into a larger context, allowing it to interact with other mechanics in an interesting way.
2. Vikings (2007)
Though Queen’s Necklace and Vegas Showdown both tightly integrated Dutch Auctions into their game flow, the result was still obviously a Dutch Auction. Vikings, in contrast, was one of the first games to make that integration more organic — to make it feel like a standard mechanic and not like an auction at all.
In Vikings, you’re buying meeples (and associated tiles) that are priced from 0-11 coins. The trick is that the prices are marked by a spinning turntable in the middle of the game board. Whenever the lowest priced meeple is bought, then the turntable spins until the lowest price gets to the next available meeple … which reduces the cost of all the meeples.
To make the price reductions even more irregular, the rules disallow you from buying the lowest priced meeple unless you have no money or it’s the last meeple of its color. This makes the Dutch auction move in ebbs and flows — as all the prices stay the same, then suddenly drop by a large amount. It’s a nice variant compared to the regularity of the typical Dutch Auction.
1. Copycat (2012)
In my opinion, the deckbuilding game Copycat (2012) shows the cleanest and tightest integration of Dutch Auctions to date — to the point where most players wouldn’t recognize the mechanic as a Dutch Auction. Every turn, you get to buy cards for your deck, but the cards that have appeared the most recently cost +1 or +2 coins to purchase (adding to the cost shown on the card itself). This is managed by placing all of the cards in a line that fills from right to left; as cards get pushed to the left (due to purchases), they move from +2 spaces to +1 space to +0 spaces.
I should note that this mechanic was purposefully copycatted from Through the Ages (2006) which similar decreases the costs of cards the longer they’ve been in the game, but which does so at a more extreme level, with cards costing 1, 2, or 3 civil actions depending on their placement.
In any case, Copycat’s Dutch auction is totally automatic and can result in irregular price drops, since the number of cards that are bought and their placement can vary. It’s not quite as in-your-face as Viking’s cool auction wheel; instead it almost fades into the background, which makes it a very good mechanic by a totally different criteria.
Coda: The Double Dutch Auction
I’ll admit I made that term up. What I’m calling a “Double Dutch” auction is a “reverse” Dutch Auction that has been popular in role selection and worker placement games. Instead of decreasing the cost of an item that can be purchased, a Double Dutch Auction increases the value of something that can be taken. Puerto Rico (2002) does this by placing coins on unselected roles, while Agricola (2007) increases the goods available through certain unused worker positions. Most other games have followed in one of these methodologies. The result is an interesting variant of Dutch Auctions that probably could be expanded as well — and in any case is worth mentioning here.
So, that’s my take on some of the most interesting Dutch Auction designs. Did I miss any great ones?
The Speicherstadt and Spyrium are two games that also use Dutch auctions well. The twist that both games offer is that players determine the starting value of a card through supply and demand, and the final cost is reduced as players drop out of buying the card. The Speicherstadt uses this worker placement/Dutch auction in a purer form; there’s more of a game wrapped around it in Spyrium.
Yes, Spyrium is an interesting one too, as every turn you get to pay the decreasing price or else take a decreasing amount of money (if I remember it correctly), so it’s a Dutch Auction with a converse option!
The Speicherstadt has a mechanic that could be considered a form of Dutch Auction and it’s expansion adds a another twist of one. In the base game there are several items available and players take turns placing their meeples on the items they would like. As more people “bid” the potential price goes up. After all the meeples are placed, the player’s decide if they want to pay a coin for each later bid for that item. If they decline, the next placed meeple’s owner has a chance, etc. So the first there can always have the item for the max price, but as player’s pass the price drops. In the expansion there are another set of items that are placed in a queue. When resolving, the player that put the first item into the queue, but the cost is the number of items later in the queue. In this case, if the time isn’t purchased, it’s simply discarded from the game.
You might have mentioned Suburbia, in which tiles have a very variable base price, but have an add-on to that price depending on how recently the tile has come out. The add-on drops each turn. This strikes me as a similar mechanism to the ones you mention (though I suspect it was inspired by Through the Ages).
I did a geeklist on the ‘supply track’ mechanism you describe in Copycat. I believe the first example was Dirk Henn’s Show Manager in 1996.
Here’s Martin’s list for anyone else who’d like to take a look. Good stuff!
http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/153620/tracing-the-lineage-of-the-card-rowsupply-track-me
I thought of ShowManager when I saw this post. And yes, great GeekList.
8 Minute Empire has 6 cards on a market row, the card on the left is free and the price goes up to the right. When a card is bought, then the remaining cards shift left to fill the space and a new one is put on the far right (the most expensive spot). The price at each spot is always fixed (something like 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3). Money is extremely tight so the choice of paying 2 or 3 for something vs paying 0 or 1 but then letting that more expensive card drop in price for your opponent… that’s often a tough choice.
Morels has 8 cards in a line, with cards dropping off the near end and new ones coming onto the far end. Either of the 2 closest cards can be had for free and then the cost goes up by 1 for each card further down the line. This game has the added bit of “wait too long and that card goes from free to in the garbage pile”.
All great examples. The Copycat/Through the Ages mechanism for purchases seems to be the most obviously part of a long chain of designs.
“Merchants of Amsterdam (2000) is… a Dutch Auction game where there’s a literal clock that counts down prices. When someone likes a price they smack the clock (poor clock!) and get to make the purchase at the current price… the Dutch Auction isn’t elegantly integrated into the structure of a game”
I think that this is a little harsh. MoA’s theme is the rise and fall of Holland’s economic power back when there were merchants who dressed like the guys on the box. I’d say that the Dutch Auction mechanism is “elegantly intergrated” with that theme. I don’t recall it jarring with any of the game’s other mechanisms.
Knizia is often criticized for pasted-on themes, and that’s true of many of his games. But MoA tells a story (rise and fall) of a Dutch economy using Dutch auctions. There’s some integration right there.
It’s also uses the mechanism more purely that the other games you list in your post. And thank you very much for the interesting post.
Andrew
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