Secret Bidding Mechanics and Games

The poker chips with the little 'teeth' around the side are pretty resistant to spilling over.

I would risk the open stacks rather than use the various bags which just feels a little cumbersome.

The only game that I can think of that even comes close to multithreaded bidding is Shogun (samurai swords) though it is more resource allocation instead of bids, except for the ninja.

I think the important part of blind bidding is that there needs to be lots of other visible information. I forget what game it was I played that had blind bidding on an uncertain result. The result of auctions felt completely random.

I only mention this because you have hidden victory conditions. And unsure endings on auctions.

I haven't played it, but there's a mechanism in Azteca that might resemble what you're talking about. I remember it involved secretly dropping money into two different boxes, voting for the advancement of one god or another. Periodically, the boxes are opened and one or the other god advances. (Or something like that.)

-- Matt

I don't think blind bidding games are completely uncommon, but they do provoke mixed reactions. Some people think they're great, some people avoid them like the plague. Some of the better/more popular ones include Aladdin's Dragons and Pizarro & Co.

I came up with a "semi-blind bid" mechanic such that the back-printing of the cards used in bidding have an icon that indicates what it's possible range of values could be. (eg, one coin was 1-3, two coins was 4-6, etc). I put the game up for discussion in the Game Design Workshop, it is/was called "Profit and Provenance". It worked pretty well but there were/are issues with some of the systems unrelated to bidding that I haven't yet ironed out. In a funny coincidence, a very similar mechanic appeared in the game Maya.

I have a different game in which there's an organization that has 8 positions, and players have cards that correspond specifically to one of the positions. They also have vote cards that can be used either to remove or protect existing members of the organization. There's a removal phase and a replacement phase, and the goal is obviously to remove the cards of other players for positions that you have cards to fill. The vote cards were only "yes" and "no", so it's not exactly like your game, but there are some similar ideas where you're trying to figure out, based on how a player is voting, what positions he has cards for.

It works in my game because it's really simplistic and the revelations come quickly. But I'd be careful about a game that had hidden bidding AND hidden goals. The game might just rely too heavily on intuition that it might cross over into being luck-heavy. You have to make sure that players are getting enough information to make intelligent moves, AND that figuring out things like "what goal is Joe pursuing?" or "what way is Tom seeking to influence this particular bid" is of some value, in the sense that a player who figures out the answer to such a question can impact the game productively.

For a sanity check, you might just try the game out at some point with fully public goals and fully public bidding, and see if it actually makes the game significantly worse. If not, you might keep it that way -- the game could still be fun, but won't automatically turn off those who dislike blind bidding. I think that's really something that everyone who wants to have secret information should really think through -- what is the real reason that this information needs to be secret? What skill set am I looking to test? What player experience I'm looking to create?

Not saying there's never a context in which hidden information isn't interesting -- it often is -- just saying that designers who are looking to come up with, for example, the perfect double-blind movement system, may be doing so without a clear gameplay purpose in mind.

-Jeff

In my game each stack contains multiple totals. For example I may want to influence a certain stack to have more A and less B, so I play a +A card and a -B card on it. When the results are revealed we see how A-F (or so) are influenced in that particular stack.

This works fine, except that after a certain number of cards have been played, no one knows how much A-F have been modified and if they're wasting their time by trying to change it. As such I allow players to periodically examine the stacks to get an idea of what's going on, but it's unrealistic for anyone to remember the approximate totals of A-F for a given stack. That means that players either have to exercise amazing memories (which rewards those with good memories) or that it has to be recorded somehow. Recording it, while true to the theme (polling the voters), is a hassle, so the whole mechanic might well be wiped. That or I'll come up with a way for the most recent poll numbers to be displayed on the board and discard the current stacks, something like that.

In my case the stacks of unkown (but not unknowable) information grow and grow over the course of the game, resulting in a problem. I doubt that your game encounters the same problems.

-- Matthew