Bidding game for 2

🦸 Heroes for Sale was one of our small-game purchases at #SPIEL23 . The uniqueness of it is what caught my eye: it is a 2-player dueling card game, with bidding as its main mechanic! Bidding is something that you rarely see in 2p games, or there are many multiplayer games that no longer work that well when played with only 2p, which is why I wanted to get this! 🙃

Heroes for Sale reminds me of Mindbug and if you know it you’ll see why.
At setup you each get a hand of cards and 4 facedown cards that are “bases” to be destroyed. This is also a clever come-back mechanic, because if your base is destroyed you get to draw it as a card! ☝️

On your turn your cards in play attack first: you add together their attack values, and each 5 attack value destroys an enemy base, unless they have a Vanguard unit to sacrifice to completely defend the attack. If you destroy all 4 bases, you win the game! 🏆

Then you get to play a card, however your opponent can bid on it immediately, and either buys it for that much money, or you can overbid them to play it for yourself. (There is only one round of bidding). So while cards are all free by default, players can influence their cost. You start out with 20 money, and though some cards do generate money, after a while you won’t be able to bid at all. So you have to be sparing with this!

Whoever wins the card places it in front of them. These either have an “on-play” effect, or some passive effect that is active until they are there. Normally you cannot target cards, except when another card says so, so many of these passive effects can be quite impactful.

So this is the flow of the game, and the main challenge is deciding each turn on the fly which cards are powerful enough to bid high, and what cards you don’t care that much about. It’s fun and quick, and I think I might prefer it over Mindbug. It has the same self-balancing aspect, that none of your cards are really “yours”, as the opponent can take them, but it flows a bit better.

I think only a German edition was sold, but I’d hope that an English edition is on the horizon too.