Pyramid Review
For Sale
Published by Uberplay
Designed by Stefan Dorra
60 full-color cards, 72 chips, 1 rulebook; $19.95
There is a mathematical/psychological puzzle surrounding the notion of auctioning off a dollar. Obviously, in a typical auction you'd expect the bidding to stop at ninety nine cents, or a dollar at most. The curiosity stems from a simple rule change: the number two bidder must pay his bid as well, though he gets nothing! Now if you bid a dollar and someone bids a dollar ten, you're motivated to bid a dollar twenty, since winning the auction and losing twenty cents is better than losing the auction and losing your dollar. Google "dollar auction" to read about this curious parlor game that arose from an attempt to create a game that demonstrated addiction . . .
Obviously, the winning move is not to play, but in For Sale you are gently tugged into one of the most gentle but brutal auction mechanisms around, as you buy homes, and then try to sell them for the most money.
The game is played in two distinct phases. In the first phase the players bid their starting money tokens to purchase homes of various values (one each of one through 30), and in the second phase these homes are sold for checks (two void, and two each of $2,000 through $15,000). Your final score is the total of all your checks plus whatever money you had left over from the first phase.
During the first phase each auction is started by dealing out face up as many home cards as there are players. Players . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: September 23, 2005
Copyright © 2005 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.