Bidding on Old Money's misfortunes..
Number of Players
3-6
Recommended Ages
12+
Time to Play
60-90 minutes
Mechanics Used
Auction, Blind Bidding, Card Queue
Elevator Pitch
Completion Status
An auction game with heavy decisions and a budget card queue that, when taken lightly, could leave a player in the poor house.
Incomplete. New cards incoming to test latest revision.
Instant art collection...
This one is extremely early in development and owes most of it's existence to the fact that I haven't made an auction game at all, yet. So with the Nouveau Riche theme, I wanted a game where the auction cards worked in a unique way. One could argue, too unique as the second version is currently on order from The Game Crafter.
So there are these paintings cards and they are your victory points. Each card belongs to a “set” which is a painting being sold out of some unfortunate “old money” collection down on their times. Your goal is to acquire these paintings in certain sets to achieve bonus points. So you win the auction to acquire these cards.
You bid in auctions using your bidding cards which, currently, confuses the hell out of players (I'm hoping the next set changes that). You see, played in one direction, the card is a bid but played in another direction, it's an income card. All cards played enter a queue and when you collect income, you gather cards from the front of your queue. Thus a lot of this games buying power is wrapped up into the manipulation of this card queue.
As such a young game, there isn't much history to tell. I wanted a simple auction card game with a theme I personally enjoy. On the first swing out, the cards were largely a failure since simple mistakes are easy to repeat, such as having quick knowledge of your card values when fanned out. The bidding portion also confused players too as, unlike a lot of auction games, you didn't need to exceed the previous bid, simply bid again to stay in the running. To fix this notion, I think I'll be changing the theme to a “private auction” concept.
Finally, the scoring. And I made a massive mess of this. HUGE mess. There were 4 sets with 6 lots, each lot containing 2 cards. If you gained one card of each lot in a set, bonus points. If you gained both paintings in a lot, bonus points. To me, this makes sense. To players, with was a constant source of frustration and confusion. So it's gone.
The current version undergoes a few changes. First, with the paintings. These are much simpler as Lots have been ditched. There are now only sets/colors. So points + potential bonus for collecting in a single color. Now onto how the bidding works. I'm making this stuff blind and hoping it won't frustrate players. You place a bid card face down, and an income card face up. This way, no one knows what's being bid until the end of the auction. The information is laid out better as well and I will be using the mini cards since they take up less space in front of you. New abilities and such too. Let's hope this works!
The History of Nouveau Riche Auction Game
