Bidlz
Publishers Ex Systemate have chosen a title for this game that is likely to wreak havoc with your autocorrect. Every time we typed the title for this review the software tried to autocorrect it, more often than not to Badly. But that's by the by. What's important is that this is a word game where you're racing to be the first to spell a word of five or more letters. Crucially tho' players have to gain the letters by successfully bidding for them.
Designed by Zac Burns, the game is notionally for 2–5 players but, like most auction games, it's not much of a contest with just two players. With three or four players, everyone starts off with a secret letter card hidden shielded from others' view by a screen. With five players, everyone has two secret cards. Players also have 15 coins. Our plays at Board's Eye View yielded several complaints that the secret cards started each game off with a huge luck factor. As even the most casual Scrabble player knows, an E is a lot more versatile than a V. If, like us, you find this high luck factor off putting, it's easy enough to house rule an alternative. We settled for handing players the deck and letting everyone take any card of their choice as their secret selection.
Each turn, a letter card is flipped and players bid on it. Bidding is blind (you conceal in your hand the number of coins you're bidding, and players simultaneously reveal). The player who makes the highest bid gets the card and adds it to their individual tableau, tho' their secret card remains hidden - only to be revealed if and when used to create a word. The twist in this auction game is that the price paid by the winner isn't the amount they bid but the next highest bid. So if I bid 10 coins and the other three players bid 5, 4 and 3 coins respectively, I pay 5 coins not the 10 I bid. This is an interesting auction mechanic because it incentivises players to bid competitively to ensure another player doesn't get a card too cheaply. On the other hand, any player that bids zero is given a coin for their trouble. We liked the push-pull of this mechanic: do you bid zero to gain a coin so you have greater chance of winning another card that you really want, or do you bid higher to avoid an opponent gaining a card for free?...
In addition to the letter cards, the deck includes a number of Power cards. They include potentially very powerful effects; for example, counting double letter cards like SH, TH and OO as two letters towards a five-letter word, or allowing one of your letter cards to be used twice in a word. When Power cards turn up, they are bid for in the same way as letter cards. There are also Event cards. Their effects are immediately applied but they are not subject to auction. The Power cards certainly add to the game; less so the Event cards, which can come across as quite arbitrary rather than purposeful. Similarly, having some letter cards give every player four coins when flipped seemed a clunky way of injecting more coins into the game.
The cards benefit from attractive art from Matthis Schroeder featuring fantasy fauna and our copy of Bidlz came with a 'Bestiary & Lore' booklet telling us about all of the fantasy critters. This was surprising because, charming as they are, the various featured creatures are merely incidental background illustration that pay no part at all in the game as it's presented. It left us with the feeling that were a lot of interesting ideas behind Bidlz but not all of them had yet been fully developed.
