Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Money Auction in Liar's Dice game

Talking about this game idea with Andy Van Zandt, here's a way that might be more elegant than adding money to the game...

After each round of Bluff auctions, the winner of each is determined and, on the spot, they may choose to either:
(a) Keep the item for their display
(b) Sell the item to the game in exchange for 1 color die
(c) Offer the item for open trade to an opponent.

Upon seeing who's won an item, players can freely offer any number of their dice or artifacts in exchange for the artifact just won by the player. The player is welcome to entertain any such offer, or ignore them in favor of keeping the item for themselves or discarding it from the game and collecting an extra color die.

There might need to be a rule that the player cannot accept an item they cannot display. there will be 5 different colors of items, and players will each be able to display only 3 of them. Then again, I think that restriction might be a dumb one. I had planned on making different types of items: Weapons, Tools, Art, etc. and a player could make a Green (Mayan, for example) exhibit, or a Weapons exhibit containing a Mayan weapon, a Roman weapon, and an American weapon. That seems better, and would obviate the need for a restriction on what you can accept in trade.

This might be a more elegant way of adding a supplemental auction to the game without adding money to the game. I'll keep it in mind!

I also need a name for this game. I like the subtitle Museum of Lost History, but I need a catchy name with a hook for the actual title. Perhaps Chrono Gallery: Museum of Lost Time?

Feel free to chime in in the comments with a better title!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

If you are adding money to a lair's dice kind of game...it seems like you might as well just play poker.

Seth Jaffee said...

The main difference is that you're not winning or losing money as a result of the Liar's Dice mechanism. Instead, you're using money as a currency to buy/sell/trade the items that have been distributed through the Bluff Auction (Liar's Dice). The idea was that money would be worth points, so if you don't do well in the bluff auction, then you can still potentially get items you want by effectively trading points for them.

Based on this most recent post, I think a nicer way is to remove actual money from the equation, and have players trade other items and/or dice (power in future bluff auctions).