Designing Auctions Players Can Afford to Lose

Auction mechanics risk degenerate gameplay when the item bid on is so valuable that players are forced to bid it up. Generally, you want situations where players are comfortable losing an auction. One easy way to do this is through side effects, connecting the bidding process to other subgames so a player can surrender progress in the auction subgame to gain an advantage elsewhere.

The base combat rules for the Dune board game are a great example of a pure auction verging on degeneracy. In combat, you dial a number of troops you are willing to sacrifice and add a leader to that number. If you win, you lose what you dialed, but if you lose, all your troops die. In practice, players usually dial a number big enough to ensure victory since those troops die anyway if they lose. This makes combat less nuanced than it could be.

The advanced combat variant fixes this problem by introducing spice support: you can pay spice to support your troops, and if you don't, they count at half strength. This means you might conserve spice by deliberately dialing a low number. Knowing this, your opponent has more freedom to dial lower numbers. By connecting the auction directly to the spice economy subgame, advanced combat breaks the degenerate equilibrium of high bids.

Furnace is another great example of how to offer auction incentives beyond winning bids to avoid degenerate strategies. Players bid tokens valued 1-4 on different company cards needed for engine-building. Whoever bids the most on a card gets it, but the other players on that card receive resources equal to their bid. It is common for players to deliberately lose a bid because they need the resources offered.

Giving auctions multiple dimensions beyond price is a great way to avoid degeneracy. When designing auction mechanics, some useful questions to ask are:

• Does bidding affect any other subgames?
• When do players want to lose an auction?