The Art of Buying Low and Selling High

by Mark Edwards
6th grade Strategy Games

This year I wanted to find a great game to introduce the auction/bidding mechanism.  Stefan Dorra's game, For Sale(1997), does just that without adding any complexity or other mechanisms.  The game  consists of sixty cards and some money tokens. 
 

(Image Credit: Justin Case, user Gambiteer on BGG)

The goal is to purchase houses as cheaply as possible at auction and then in the second phase of the game, sell those houses for as much as possible.   

A deck of cards, numbered 1-30, represents houses that range in value from the meager cardboard box(Card #1) all the way up to an out-of-this-world starbase((Card #30).  In a 4-player game four houses are revealed from a shuffled deck.  Then the players place bids for the right to claim the highest valued home.  A player who chooses to pass on bidding gets to take the lowest valued house and must pay half of his bid to the bank.  The sole remaining high bidder gets the highest valued house and must pay the entire bid amount to the bank.  After all the houses are purchased in this manner, gameplay moves to the second phase.

Property and Prosperity

Houses the players have purchased now serve as their hand of cards in the second phase.  A deck of cards that represents buyers is shuffled, and in a 4-player game, four buyer cards are revealed.  Each buyer card has the dollar amount the buyer is willing to pay for a house.  The players each choose a house from their hand and simultaneously reveal it.  The player who reveals the highest house receives the buyer's card with the highest dollar amount.  After all the houses are sold in this manner, the players total up all of their home sales and the highest earner wins! 

Students were thrilled to see a home they purchased for $1000 sell for $15000!