3 and 4 Player Games

Before reading this make sure you understand how the 2 player auction works.

With 3 or 4 players the auction follows the same idea, but it becomes very hard to describe in words. BGA runs an automatic bidding war: players who don't hold a faction bid one step at a time on the faction with the greatest gap between its current bid and their maximum bid, outbidding each other until everyone holds a faction. When one player gets outbid, they may switch to a different faction, which pushes someone else out, and so on. The final result depends on how all the players' bids interact.

Instead of reading long walkthroughs, use the Playground: choose 3 or 4 players, move the sliders and watch who gets which faction, how many VP they pay, and the full bid log step by step — the same log BGA shows at the start of the game.

Key points

• Bids are still relative: always bid 0 on the weakest faction to simplify your calculations
• Your bid is the maximum you are ready to pay, you usually pay less
• Try different examples in the Playground to build intuition