This site allows players who play the board game, Nations, using MaBiWeb to auction the nations available for a given match. The idea is to use bidding to offset the advantages one nation has over another. Auctions can already be done using the chat feature of MaBiWeb, but since many of the matches played there are played by people living in disparate time zones, a style of auction where players take turns bidding can take a very long time.
To speed things up, players can use a blind auction. With people in the same room, a blind auction can be done by having each person write down their bid, and then once everyone has bid, revealing the bids simultaneously.
That doesn't work for correspondence play. Even if everyone could be online at the same time, how could you reveal simultaneously? You would need some way to collect the bids without other players seeing what bids have already been made and without being able to change theirs in response.
Enter BidBot! BidBot is a place where players can enter their bids without revealing them to other players. Once all players in a match have locked in their bid, all of the bids are revealed. BidBot also uses the bids to decide who won each nation and for what price.
Alright, let's get started!
Or learn about the algorithm BidBot uses to assign nations to players.