For Sale

‘Buy low, sell high!’ The key strategy to many games, and For Sale is no exception to that. In For Sale, you and the other players take on the role of a realtors, bidding on homes for as low as you can get them for and then flipping them for profit when home buyers start making offers.

For Sale is played out in two phases. In the first phase, home cards equal to the number of players will be put up for auction for the players to bid on and collect to form their hand of cards for the second phase. Players will take turns bidding in clockwise order, any bid must always increase the previous bid by at least one dollar. Any player may pass on bidding, and if they do, they collect the lowest value home in the current round of bidding, paying half (rounded up) of the amount they bid for that round back to the bank. Bidding continues for the rest of the players until only one bid remains and that player will collect the highest value home while paying their total bid. The auction begins again with homes from the deck until all the home cards are collected by players.

Once all the homes in the first phase are collected, the second phase begins where offers will be made by homebuyers. Offer cards equal to the number of players will be laid out and players will use their home cards that they collected in the previous phase to earn as much money as they can. Each player will simultaneously place a home card from their hand face down and reveal their calues together. The highest value home will collect the largest offer and each other offer is collected based on the next highest value homes. Once all the home cards have been sold, the game end and the player with the most money wins!

There is a lot of fun to be had from For Sale. Like many push your luck games, such as Skull or Coyote, For Sale has you reading how far you think you push your opponent to bid on home cards early to put them in a bad position in the later auctions. The game can throw a scenario where the highest value home is 30 and the lowest value is 1 during an auction, forcing players to enter a game of chicken in bidding to not end up with the worst card in the game, only to turn it around during the second phase where the offers being put up are only high value offers making the 1 value home more useful than the 30. As one of the quicker games around as well, For Sale can be quickly taught to players, making it what I would consider to be one essential pick up game to bring to any game night.

The regular For Sale and the travel For Sale are available now from our webstore. Both versions offer the same components and gameplay at different price points.