The Tabletop Takeaway: A Board Game Design Podcast · Ananda Guneratne, Charlie McCarron, Trevor Muller-Hegel

108. Auction Games

·27 min·2 clips

Discover how Dune's Advanced Spice variant turns brutal combat into a strategic bidding mind game.

Auction games blur quickly. The panel starts by owning the problem: if the first example in your head is Monopoly-style bidding on property nobody wants, the whole category can feel pretty thin. No Thanks makes the first crack in that. Its inverse auction gives players a reason to want less, which is already more interesting than another price climb. Cyclades and Indonesia stretch the conversation further. Instead of treating auctions as one tidy mechanism, Trevor Muller-Hagel, Ananda Gunaratna, and Charlie McCarron keep circling a better question: what is each bid really measuring? That gets concrete with a used-car prototype, where players pay for information before deciding whether a car is worth chasing. The bluff is the juicy part. A player can look thrilled about a car, tempt others into paying for the same hidden knowledge, and maybe leave them staring at a wreck. But the design problem is still right there. Information only matters when players have different reasons to care about what it says. Indonesia gives that idea some bite. Going first can be great for one player and useless for another. Yeah, that is the shape of it. Auctions get richer when the same object or clue does not mean the same thing to everyone. The closing comparison to push-your-luck games lands in a similar place: risk changes when it depends on memory, puzzle solving, or confidence inside your own head. By the end, auctions feel less like price contests and more like little pressure cookers for timing, incentives, asymmetry, and self-assessment.

As heard by us

A clear look at auctions as systems of value, not just bidding.

The episode keeps circling one useful question: what, exactly, is being priced at the table? The game itself, turn order, information, or the edge around it.

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Why you'd press play

You want a sharp tour of auction games beyond Monopoly-style bidding.

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