Five Designs of Dutch Auctions

Merchants of AmsterdamAuctions 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.

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New To Me: Winter & Spring 2013

As with its predecessors, this article is intended to talk about the games that I played recently which I’d never played before. Most of them are games that were published in the last year or so within the United States, but on occasion I play a “new to me” game that is quite older; they’re all listed here.

I usually write this article on a quarterly basis, since that tends to offer up a good selection of new games. However, my new game selection in Winter was quite poor due to a combination of sickness and vacation (fortunately, not at the same time!). So I didn’t write the article in April, as I usually would have … then got deluged by new games in Spring. So, I’ve got a lot to talk about this time …

Keep in mind these are not my assessments of whether the games are good or bad, but instead my assessments of whether they appeal to me. Generally, I like light but strategic games that are euro designs but that don’t feel like work to me. They’re in roughly descending order of interest. Continue reading

A Deckbuilding Look at Copycat

CopycatThough deckbuilding games have been around for a few years now, we haven’t seen many experienced eurogame designers dive into the category. Martin Wallace’s A Few Acres of Snow (2011) was a notable exception — and unsurprisingly one of the most distinct deckbuilder designs. Thus, I was very pleased to see Copycat (2012), by experienced euro designer Friedemann Friese.

The Game

Copycat is uniquely a game that combines worker placement mechanics and deckbuilder mechanics. After players have auctioned for initiative, they place workers on certain choice office spaces. Only afterward do they have the opportunity to purchase new cards and earn victory points.

The game works because its two parts are very symmetrical — a topic I’m going to return to shortly. The powers of the worker placement spaces and the powers of deckbuilt cards have a lot of overlap: either one can give a player money to spend, or let him draw cards, or earn him victory points. The worker placement spaces provide the unique ability to give players “buys” — which are required to actually make purchases — while the cards have several (slightly) more esoteric powers, and also offer the unique ability to give players more workers to place.

The entire goal of the game is to earn victory points. These show up whenever players place workers in victory point spaces, play victory point cards, or use worker placement spaces that were unpopular in recent rounds. At the end of the game, players may also get the opportunity to turn their last hand’s worth of money into victory points — though this can sometimes be blocked by other players.

No matter what sort of deck a player made, it’s the person who earned the most points over the course of the game who wins.

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