I Bid You Not

I Bid You Not is, surprisingly, a bidding game. But its the simplest one I could ever come up with, while being more than just a shouting match.

On the table is an offer of cards (depicting odd gadgets and products). On your turn, you can either add a card to the offer (from your hand), or declare an auction.

An auction means all players secretly bid a card and the highest wins. They score the current offer and we go again.

This wouldn’t be a Pandaqi game, though, if there weren’t one or two big BUTs here ;) Tiny fun rule changes that turn the entire game on its head and allow you to win even if you have terrible cards with low numbers.

What’s special?

I remember writing down this entire game idea at 9 AM, after being forced to get up at 7 AM to go to the dentist. I was sleep-deprived, but also realized I now had the entire day ahead of me. I kept walking in circles through our garden—it was a sunny day—until the idea was fully formed in my head.

And then I forgot about it for a year. I kept writing down “make that simple game that is very promising”, but I also felt that it wasn’t very … unique?

So I’m glad I basically sidelined it for a year, because when I came back I immediately saw the few tweaks that were needed to actually make the idea stand out more.

I’m usually too impatient, jumping head-first into projects and trying to completely finish them in one go. But this was another reminder that some ideas just need to breathe for a while.