Greetings fellow designers. I'm in the early stages of research and design for a game involving an auction mechanic, but since I have limited experience with auction games, and am currently between play groups after moving to a new state, I am hoping to tap into the abundant wisdom represented on this forum.
I'm exploring three ideas for an auction mechanic, any combination of which may end up in the game. The first is using the auction as a card acquisition mechanic for deck building. A brief BBG search shows minimal cross over for these mechanics in existing games, and those that do use both don't seem to use an auction to impact deck building. My gut tells me that an auction to acquire each card would take far too long, so this would likely involve bidding to acquire a set of cards, which could be assembled either completely randomly, or with some level of order (each set has 1 bad card, 2 OK cards and 1 great card). What are your thoughts on this idea? Have I missed another game that uses this idea?
Second, I'm considering auctioning off some profoundly different rules to play by. Think Fluxx, but each person is playing with a different set of "New Rule" cards in front of him or her. Players bid at the start of the game to determine things such as hand size, how many cards to draw and play each turn, or access to special abilities. Pushing this to the extreme could lead to Cosmic Encounter levels of imbalance between players, but whereas that game uses player interaction via negotiation to restore balance, this idea would allow players to set the market price for various advantages. Bids could include handicapping points, skipping turns, filling your deck with junk cards, etc. My big question here is whether an auction mechanic could be designed to provide enough balance to allow for this type of swing. Thoughts?
Finally, with both of these ideas, I'm playing with the idea of bidding for draft position, rather than a specific item. This is to say that in a six player game, 6 sets of cards to put in your deck (or 6 sets of rules/abilities) would be visible to all players. The players then have an auction to determine who gets the first pick. After a player wins and drafts some cards/rules, he or she is out of the remaining auctions, and the other players have another auction to determine who gets the second pick. I think this could be interesting, because if two different players are targeting different items to draft, they may not realize this, and attempt to outbid each other for a high pick, when in fact the item they want will still be available. Obviously this is somewhat similar to bidding for turn order, as done in many games, but the difference here is that each player completes his or her turn before the other players bid for the next spot. Thoughts? Has this type of auction/draft hybrid been done elsewhere?
Finally, I've tried to do a brief survey of auction games to become familiar with some of the current implementations, but what are some of the big names that I should familiarize myself with if I decide to move forward with this project?
