STORAGE AUCTION SHOWDOWN

About

2-5 Players | 20-40 minutes

Category: Bluffing, Card Game

Mechanisms: Auction/Bidding, Dice Rolling, Set Collection, Variable Player Powers

Can you best manage your cash, buy the right items, and play to your unique strengths to become master of the storage auction?

In Storage Auction Showdown, players are competing in a storage auction. The auction consists of a series of storage units being sold off, one after the other. Storage units have a randomized variety of items inside. Items come in 7 different types, plus several special unique items. Each item scores you points and/or utilizes an ability. Some items will be hidden from you during an auction, so you’ll need to decide how much of your cash you want to risk bidding on the unknown. The player willing to pay the most for a storage unit gets all its items, whether those are treasures or trash. At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins!

Storage Auction Showdown features hidden information and unique player powers, is quick to learn and play, and has high variability each game. It also has a significant amount of luck, is family friendly, has no player elimination, and simultaneous play with minimal downtime.

SERVICES PROVIDED

• Game Design

• Content Design

• Editing

PROJECT OVERVIEW

I am the designer of Storage Auction Showdown and created the game from concept to published game. I did all aspects of this game including selecting which public domain art to use, editing card text, writing the rulebook, and setting up the game’s store page. This was my first published game and I learned a lot about game design the couple years on and off I spent working on it.

This game was inspired by public storage auction reality tv shows popular in the 2010s, like Storage Wars and Auction Hunters. I set out to capture the fantasy of these shows - finding obscure valuables, bidding on the unknown, and kooky characters. However, I had to balance the theme with the practical goal of making a streamlined family friendly auction game that was tense and fair.

My first major decision was how to handle hidden information. Real life storage auctions have a peculiar twist with state law where betters can’t enter a storage unit and can only inspect items from the outside. This means there is a combination of known items that are visible, unknown items that hidden, and sometimes items that only a particular better may identify due to their special knowledge or keen eye. A storage unit can also have any number of items from just a few to completely full. Other auction games I researched simulated these experiences with complicated spreadsheets, had fixed auctions that couldn’t change game to game, or had players secretly contribute items together to form what was being bid on - all of which I wanted to avoid to keep the game streamlined and more thematic. The final result for Storage Auction Showdown was a simple system where each auction consisted of 2-6 item cards, with 1-3 of them face down and 1-3 of them face up based on rolling a dice twice. The active player could also peek at a face down card.

Figuring out how to run an auction was tricky. I discovered that having a player act as auctioneer would add excitement and keep each turn organized. Early on I decided I did not want a separate auctioneer player to run the whole game. They would have been left out of much of the fun and the game would have required an additional player. The final approach turned out to be having players rotate the auctioneer role each turn. While it breaks theme somewhat, this was best for gameplay as it created a fun dynamic and kept the game moving at a good pace. The auctioneer could still participate in the auction with the auction payments going to the bank.

Developing the math in the game was interesting. An obvious problem was I had to control the range of values for items. In real life you might find an item worth $1 or $20,000 in a storage unit. Such a range was way too volatile to have in game. There is no way a player should get lucky with one item and auto win. Even just adding scores at the end of the game would have been difficult with such numbers. I settled on a range where most items were valued 1-10, along with a few negative value trash items. This provided the surprise and emotional moments the game needed without getting out of control.

Project Highlight: Making Auctions Tense

Storage Auction Showdown features an open bidding system for its auctions. The only big decisions players are making are when to bid and how much. Auctions ARE the game, so it was especially important they were exciting and tense.

The key to making betting interesting is to have players value the items differently. To illustrate this, imagine I am auctioning off a $10 bill. How much would you be willing to pay for it? In nearly all cases such an auction would be meaningless and boring. But imagine an antique dealer bid $20. Could this bill be a rare valuable find and should you raise your bid? And who knows, maybe the antique dealer is trying to fool you! There are a combination of ways I capture the dynamic of players valuing items differently in this game.

During a single auction, some items or situations may be just strictly more valuable for certain characters, like The Veteran getting maximum value for antiques or The Hoarder getting 1 bonus point per item. Your valuation could also change based on the cards you’ve collected so far. As an example, forming an item pair with a Lock Box and a Lock Box Key scores you a huge 20 points. Yet each card alone is worth 0 points. If you’ve got a Lock Box you’d be willing to pay a high price for a shot at its key. For each single auction, one player is peeking at a face down card, giving them more yet often incomplete information on the unit’s worth.

Over the course of the game, players are considering additional factors that add to the tension. Each player starts with money they can spend on auctions. Remaining money will score you points at the end of the game. How much do you spend on each auction? While the number of units auctioned off depends on player count, you’ll never know which or how many items will show up or what will be visible in future turns. How do you budget your money over the course of the game and are you willing to take costly loans to gain extra buying power? These long terms thoughts along with the moment to moment decision of placing a single bid make for an excellent amount of tension that keeps players engaged throughout the game.