Hi guys,
Thanks, FastLearner for providing the transcript of the chat. Man, that thing is hard to wade through, but asking you to pretty it up would be asking a lot of work on a regular basis, so it's probably not worth it; if there was some way to do that, though, it would make it a lot easier to read!
Anyway, I was interested in reading the discussion on auction mechanics, because I have one or two games that use this; one, in fact, is primarily a bidding game, although it has some nice twists that make it different from other, similar games (I'll divulge more at a little later stage of development). One thing I find hardest about these games is coming up with good tiebreakers, and it seems like you need to come up with them at every turn.
I didn't see this discussed in the chat, and while I think we talked about it sometime recently, I can't remember; does anyone have any great systems that they've seen/used to break ties in bidding games? I haven't played Fist of Dragonstones, but it looks like a pretty nice system (one kind of currency is used only to break ties). There's also, of course, the system where you go around the table, so people have no choice but to outbid the other players. I think blind bidding is sometimes preferable to that, since in a 5 player game, say, the bid can escalate to the point where the fifth player in bid order is out even before it's his turn to bid. So I think blind bidding has some advantages, but breaking ties is something I always struggle with.
Any suggestions would be most appreciated!
-Jeff