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Time to Bid

Mon, 09/22/2008 - 09:35 — Scurra

As might be surmised from the title, this is intended to be an auction game.
The basic premise is this: the players are time-travellers, who are looking to obtain sets of items of historical value. However, in order to avoid drawing attention to themselves, they are doing so by attending auctions in the past where these things are being sold, rather than, e.g. stealing them. Of course they don't realise that most of the rival bidders are their own fellow chrononauts.

The problem is this: the archives and records are incomplete. The result is that the travellers turn up at an auction only knowing some things - and those may not be entirely accurate. Basically, they know two things from the three possibles: the items on offer, the prices fetched and the order of sale.

And the point of the game is that the auctions have to turn out the way the history books say - or the whole of the space-time continuum will collapse in a heap of paradox....

Comments

Mon, 09/22/2008 - 09:41 — Scurra

For example...

So basically, the idea is to have an auction in which certain aspects are fixed ahead of time, which makes for some entertaining scenarios as players have to try to adhere to those aspects.

For example, imagine a sale in which a vase, a painting and a book were all up for sale, and they have to be sold for 20, 10 and 5, but there is nothing which says which way round they went for. The players may want different items, but which of them is going to get the cheap price? And there's nothing to say that the "cheap" price is actually the one paid. As long as it isn't less than the specified one, then there is no paradox.

I'm not sure how the rest of the game would work - I am currently imagining have the auctions semi-defined at the start, and players only being able to go to some of them, and I have no idea what the winning conditions would be.

But the idea of a time-travel auction tickled me. Having to go into an auction knowing what the outcome was going to be seems nicely perverse whilst still offering lots of difficult choices for players.

Tue, 09/23/2008 - 00:14 — KrinkleChip

Interesting idea...

Hey-o. I has some suggestions to help get the gears turning.

This can work; the trick is 'fixing' the auctions beforehand. Using your example above of the vase, painting and book, and knowing the order of items and prices, you could have a set of 'Price Cards' that are placed face-down on each item.

Once everyone has finished bidding for a given item, the Price Card is revealed. If the price is not met, the players could get another round of bidding on the item. If the price is still not met, there are a couple of things you could do: A) Move a marker along a 'Paradox Track' a number of spaces equal to the difference of the revealed price and the highest bid. If the Paradox Track reaches the end, the universe implodes and everyone loses. B) An anonymous bidder buys the item and it is discarded.

There are a few things your economy probably needs, too.
-Relative Value. If a vase is always worth 'X', then there is no reason players would normally bid 20 for it one round and 5 for it another. If the value of items were based on Era, that could cause players to bid different prices from round to round. An endgame set collection scoring could be worked in, as well.

-Income Generation. If you want your players to be meeting minimum bids or face destruction of the cosmos, they're going to need cash flow. Perhaps the players sell their treasures to museums back in their own time, with different museums having different prices for different items. The caveat would be that there is only so much space each round at each museum, with players drafting where they sell their treasures. This could cause players to get less than optimal payout if poor choices are made.

There ya go. I hope it helps...

Regards,
Phil

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