Lowest Discrete Auction Game

This game is no longer running. This page describes what it was.

The Lowest Discrete Auction Game was a game of second-guessing that Nick ran from September 2014 to October 2015.

The aim was to pick the lowest number that nobody else picked, a sort of reverse auction. Several times a day all the entries were collected, and the lowest number chosen by exactly one player won. If no number was unique, nobody won that round. Your guess carried over into every later round automatically, and you could change it as often as you liked. That kept things lively: a winning number could be knocked out the next round by someone copying it, and a lower guess that had been blocked could suddenly become the winner when a rival moved.

To help players think, each round's result showed the number of entries and their median, but never the winning number itself (only the winner was told).

Over 1,569 rounds, 287 players took part. The typical winning number was 39.

The game depended on a database and on Facebook's old login service, both long gone.

Nick later built two more turn-based games on the same idea: Space Miner and the Multi-Armed Bandit game.