Bidding systems are not simple

While creating the seating royale 1, or thinking about territory royale 1, I realized I had oversimplified this idea I have been ruminating about adding bidding to spice up some games 2. Bidding is all but simple. Auctions, a subset of bidding, is actually already complex enough to have a python library (Stratepy) 3, that simulates different auction systems in python.

All of this was sparked too by the recent release of Workflows, which I’ve been very excited about. I’m best known for overengineering my personal life with tasks, automations, and other geeky stuff, but I’m yet to find a good use case to “use workflow”s. So I was hoping I could use territory royale 1 for this at some point.

Anyhow, at this point in time, and with about 3 or 4 projects in mind for christmas, I think game theory, auctions and bidding systems are going to be what I spend my time on. This is the useless deed I’m going to pay myself after so much working for money fun and profit.

There are some good resources online about game theory but for now, I will try to land seating royale at a decent spot as quick as possible, after which, i may consider creating a more generic bidding library that allows you to open/close bids and use this as an external backend system that works in different scenarios.

I shall report back.

Footnotes

// TODO: This “footnotes” heading needs to be added automatically by remark. It isn’t, and that’s not good. I also need to include h3 in headings with links, which is not there now

Footnotes

  1. Both seating, and territory royale, are games. Both based on bidding. Seatting royale is based on bidding for seats at a dinner table, where you can have any number of seats, and the same number of players. Players bid for seats in different rounds with certain game rules that can be tweaked around. Territory royale has a similar approach but is based on farming territory with a timing component. The main game token is time. You can claim as much territory as you want. The territory will be yours so long as no one else claimed it first – as soon as your claim resolves -. The trick in this game is that the larger your claim, the longer you have to wait. For example, if you claim a small pixel, you only need to wait 1 minute. If you claim 100 pixels then you have to claim 100 minutes (?) the game is dominated by whoever controls the most land. Just as in real life, no one wins forever (I guess) ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. I was recently discussing with a friend in Marketing how we should launch a tech conference that assigns booths based on bidding. Where you can know your neighbours after each round – in a similar fashion to the royales just described above. ↩

  3. https://github.com/SidZRed/stratepy/blob/main/auction_systems/README.md ↩