Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
(usually themed as money) for the item, and the next player has the op-
tion to either pass or make a bid higher than the original one. Sometimes
bidding rounds allow a player who has passed to come back later and
bid, but more often players who pass are out of that bid. In some games
each player must pay whatever is bid, but in most only the winning bid-
der (determined by the highest stated price when all other players have
passed) pays.
The engine of this system is based on trying to gauge the value of
in-game items: if you can judge the “true� value of an item, you'll know
how much money you should spend for it. But the system is deeper than
that due to an inherent bluffing mechanism—if you know another player
wants something, you can bid a bit higher than you think the item is
worth in the hopes that the other player will pay more than he or she
wants to for the item. This requires not only knowing what the item is
worth, but also having a good grasp of what the other player thinks that
item is worth. And of course, the other player can always call your bluff
and leave you to pay more than you want to for an item you may not have
wanted in the first place.
Controls
One common downside to bidding games is that sometimes it can feel
as though the amount people end up paying for things is somewhat ar-
bitrary, or even random. Of course, winning bids are not random at all.
Often, though, two players who both want an item badly will cause its
price to increase to an unnatural level, leaving a hole in the currency of
the game that produces imbalance (for at least one player, but possibly
for two or more depending on the game).
It's probably a good idea to put some kind of controls on the bidding.
Perhaps there could be only three or four levels of bidding, and players
either can't go higher, or when someone does go higher a special trigger is
activated that changes the rules in a dynamic way. It's worth mentioning
that excessive bidding tends only to be a problem for newer players, as
more experienced players will generally be more careful with their money.
Dimension
For bidding games to be interesting, bids must involve a sufficient variety
of conflicting attributes. For instance, if you and I are bidding on one
victory point, we obviously both want that victory point equally. There
is no dimension to this question: while it's still ambiguous as to whether
you will bid higher than my current bid, the interplay is flat, shallow, and
uninteresting.
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