Negative Bids

[Guest]

A bid is one of the ways that people have tried to balance out the game because of the built in advantage for the Allies. Someone agrees to play as the Axis if they get X amount of IPCs to spend on extra units before the game starts. This way the Axis player can reinforce weak up front positions or grab more territories faster. I would call this a “positive” bid, meaning that extra money and units are added to the game before playing.

What I am proposing, although I’ve never tested it out, is a negative bid for the Allied player. This means that someone would agree to play as the Allies, but they have to remove X amount of pieces from the board before starting. One of the biggest advantages to this is that it stops any kind of power Europe bid. I’ve heard people argue that the true balance point for the game would be an Axis bid of 27 or so. Of course these extra pieces, instead of being dispersed evenly, can all be thrown at Russia and it makes a rather quick game. At least with the negative bid there is less chance of a steamrolling, unless the Allied player decides to seriously weaken one front. These negative bids would typically have to be higher than the positive bids, otherwise the allies could lose a fighter and be ok. Anyway, I just had this idea for the sake of being different, but I don’t really know if it would work out better.

[Zero]

@Anonymous:

I’ve heard people argue that the true balance point for the game would be an Axis bid of 27 or so. quote]

Yipes, A bid of 27! Actually I heard somewhere of a study done of 10,000 or so online games that found the balance point for games without RR to be around 17, and the balance point with RR to be around 7. I heard that info second hand though, so do not ask me for the source.

That said, the idea of a negative bid, has some merit and could be an interesting variation. Although, it seems to me that it would be relatively easy for the Allies to eliminate large numbers of points with minimum risk. Midway, Canada, Australia, Hawaii, Alaska, South Africa, Syria = 29 IPCs to play with for obvious deletions in an Allied negative bid.