Mountain Pass - only official card that involves bidding
My Submission: |
VALLEY RETREAT LANDMARK Before the first turn, players bid VP, not more than 40VP, continuing until no player wants to bid lower. Lowest bidder takes 7 Debt and the VP they bid.
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I'm not sure why, but this challenge was especially tough. Fortunately, I had previously created Valley Retreat, which fits the criteria, as it involves bidding. Valley Retreat was meant to be a variant (or reverse) of Mountain Pass. Instead of bidding Debt to collect a fixed number of VP tokens, players bid VP to collect a fixed amount of Debt.
I had previously created this Landmark while contemplating the question "what is your opening worth?" and thinking about how to put that question directly into the game. The answer was this Landmark. Players must decide how much VP they need to forego those two opening buys. As a point of clarification--when the bidding happens, the players not only know what is in the Kingdom and the turn order, but also what their opening hand will be. All of that information contributes to the decision of how much to bid, and may make the opening less valuable to some players than others. This (maybe) can have the effect of making the randomness of your opening position have less of an impact on the game, as the player who has it worst can trade their lousy opening away for VP.
I wanted to set the maximum bid very high so it would never be higher than a reasonable bid, but I did not want the maximum to be unlimited so that players spent an hour slowly bidding down from 1000VP. I wanted to allow players multiple bids because I did not want to advantage any players (unlike Mountain Pass, which rewards the player who buys the first Province with the final bid, no player at the start of the game has earned such a benefit). That said, I would definitely encourage house rules to streamline the bidding process.