Auction paddles

What an auction adds to a game

An auction is the cleanest way ever invented to find out how much somebody actually wants something, which is why board games keep reaching for one. It works because the budget is finite: winning the first lot cheaply matters precisely as much as the last lot you can no longer afford. Remove the budget and you have a shouting contest; keep it and you have a game where every bid costs something later.

The awkward part in practice is the bookkeeping. Somebody has to remember what everybody has left, whether that bid was legal, and who won the third lot. That is all this page does: paddles with the numbers on them, budgets that come down on their own, and a list underneath of who has won what so far.

Out loud, or sealed

Open bidding is the theatrical one and the better one for a room. Bids come in out loud, whoever is running it taps the paddle, and the number climbs by whatever increment was set. Going once and going twice are deliberately manual, because the pause before the second one is the whole drama of an auction and a timer would ruin it.

Sealed bids are the strategic one. Everybody writes a number without knowing anybody else's, which turns the game from nerve into judgement, and it is the mode to use when one confident person would otherwise dominate every lot. For a classroom that is often the better choice: it gives the quiet half a real chance and it takes exactly as long as passing a phone round the room.

Points, and a silly auction to spend them on

The most fun version of this has nothing valuable in it at all. Auction off the last biscuit, first choice of seat, the right to name the team, who gets out of washing up, ten minutes of everybody else's silence. Imaginary points buying genuinely trivial things is funnier than real stakes and it works in a classroom, where the lots can be jobs nobody wants and the currency is invented at the start of the lesson.

The names come from the same shared list as every tool here with players, so the order they are in is the order the paddles are numbered. If a lot needs a clock, the countdown timer is the page to put beside it, and the scoreboard is where a longer game's points belong once the auction is over.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

It works on the one device in front of you, passed around or propped where everybody can see it. There are no rooms, no codes and no accounts, because there is no server behind this site for any of that to run through.

There are no stakes here. Nothing is wagered, nothing of value is won, and the draw is a party mechanic, not a lottery.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.auction.lots, pph.auction.state and pph.auction.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.

Player names are kept under pph.players so every tool with players reads the same list. They stay in this browser and never reach a link.