On Auctions

[Nom]

Here's a curious thought - some gambling games (Poker comes to mind) can be considered Auctions. Basically, you pay a certain amount of money for the right to compare your hand against the other player's hands, with the odd mechanic that the winner collects the loser's bids.

Some games also combine single bid secret auctions as part of a resource allocation phase. In the game Shogun (now Samurai Swords), there were 5 options for spending resource markers. Two were auctions. One was a 'winner take all' option for the 'ninja' piece, with everyone losing in a tie. The other bought the right to choose turn order (people chose in order of bid, those not paying were randomly allocated). In both cases, the resources were lost regardless of the result, and only a single bid was entered per player.

[ShannonA]

"Majority Control" games, where you gain points based upon number of pieces of a certain type or else pieces in a certain area are also really auctions, as was pointed out in some other references to this article.

Clearly, the auction mechanic is one of the cores of game design.

Shannon