Hi I'm working on a game at the moment where players undercut each other for the rights to build contracts that earn points and other abilities.
I have been trying to develop a system where players have a good chance of getting contracts and where no player can be 'shut out' completely. At the moment, this is what I have.
A number of contract cards are dealt at the start of the auction depending on how many players there are. So 2 players have 3 contract cards, 3 players have 4 and 4 players choose from 5 contract cards.
Each contract has a max bid value, so if a contract is listed with a value of 10, players can earn no more than 10 credits from that contract.
Underneath the spaces for each card is a column with numbers from 1-15. These numbers indicate for how much less than the maximum bid value they are willing to accept the contract for. So in the above example, if a player then puts her token on '6' then she is willing to accept the contract for 6 less than the maximum of 10, so 4 credits.
Now each player has 2 of these bid tokens which she can use to place her bids. Players take it in turns one after another to place a bid token on any of the spaces underneath the contract cards. This continues until all players have placed their tokens.
Bids are then resolved left to right with the lowest bidder winning the auction, unless she chooses not to in which case the winner is the next lowest bidder.
Now the twist, in the interest of fairness any unsuccessful bid tokens can be rebid on any of the remaining spaces of the contracts yet to be auctioned. The idea behind this is so that players who are undercut on one contact can have the option to undercut someone else on a different contract.
Can anyone spot anything wrong with this mechanism? I wanted auctions to be exciting, but fair, yet in play testing the auctions often become mechanical and dull, I can't work out why? Any ideas?
Sorry about the length of the post.
Yes this is something im starting to think about. I spent a lot of the time balancing the contracts so that their rewards were balanced with their costs. One of the downsides of this is that it makes each contract, pretty much universally desirable to every player, hence the bidding becomes pretty stale.