Games meet-up tonight. I was just in time to get in on a game of Q.E. which is a bidding game in which you have unlimited funds with which to bid! – but at the end of the game, whoever has spent the most money over the course of the game is disqualified. Thematically you are all playing government banks who can literally print money, and who are bailing out companies in a financial crisis; but someone is going to ruin their country in the process.
I don’t know what kind of legs the game has, but I would happily play this again. Each round a different lead player places a public starting bid on the newly-revealed company, and everyone else writes a secret bid, and all bids may be literally any amount. The lead player reviews the bids in secret, announces the winner, and secretly documents the winning bid in dry-erase pen on the company tile before returning it to the winner. The company tiles won by each player therefore provide a record of all of their successful bids. Other players will only know the lead bid and their own bid. When you bid high and lose, you realise that other people are upping the ante – but you don’t know by how much, and you also don’t know how you compared to the other losers (unless any players bid zero which is made public knowledge, but provides that player some points on a maximum of three occasions).
(The worst part of the game was when I had flashbacks to trying to buy a house in a really horrible housing market, when we kept submitting larger and larger offers, but were still being outbid every time…)
At the start of the game the lead bid was 100. The end of the game saw a bid of 900,000 (which also lost that player the game : )
Early in the game I was in knots over whether to bid as much as 12,000 and probably lost a company by changing my mind and dropping down to around 8,000. Late in the game I was throwing hundreds of thousands at things, and feeling like a fool for quibbling over such tiny amounts earlier. Except you don’t actually know for sure that the numbers are going to escalate, and the prospect of finding that you’ve spent more than everyone else is always hanging over you. And if you increase the bidding early, things will probably just escalate faster.
I ended up spending the second highest amount of money and also winning the game. The two don’t necessarily go hand in hand, but it’s probably a pretty good spot to be in. I started throwing a lot of money around in order to get myself some good bonuses and would have lost on that account were it not for the should-have-been-the-winner panicking on the final round and pushing their spending past mine by about 100,000 or so.
Unusual and fun.
We then played Sushi Go Party (which I also won, but only via the tie-breaker of having more dessert cards than the other player with the same score).
Finally myself and one of the other players at our table split off for a game of Targi which I’ve been wanting to play for a long time, and which didn’t disappoint. It’s a really neat design! I didn’t come close to winning this game (I managed about 3/4 of their score), but I had a good time and I hope to play it again before long.