How to play

Two bidders or up to eight, a hundred million each. Everybody buys five players, then the rosters play and the scoreline is the whole point. A one-on-one game takes about five minutes.

The shape of a sale

Every slot must be filled, which is the constraint the whole game turns on. You cannot spend ninety on one superstar and field four empty positions — the auction reserves what you still need, so the most you can bid is always your budget minus a minimum for each remaining hole.

Calling a lot

Bidders take turns calling lots. When it is your turn you choose a position, not a player. The room then brings out somebody who can play it.

This is the rule that makes the game what it is. You cannot simply nominate the best player alive and buy him; you say "I want a centre" and find out who walks out. It keeps a sale unpredictable and it makes calling a lot a real decision: naming the position you are weakest at means bidding against an opponent who knows you need it.

Bidding

The lot opens at $1M held by whoever called it. The other bidder can raise or concede. Any bid resets the clock to ten seconds; when it runs out, the player is sold at the standing price.

Raises follow a ladder that scales with the price, the way a real saleroom does — a million at a time near the bottom, never a million at a time near the top.

You can override the ladder and jump the price deliberately — $1M, $5M, $10M or $25M — which is how you shut somebody out of a player you have decided you are having.

From the keyboard

B bids, C concedes, and 1 to 4 set the raise. Under a ten-second clock, a keystroke beats moving a mouse.

Silent bids

A league can be sold silently instead. Every seat writes one sealed bid for the lot, nobody sees anybody else's, and when the envelopes are opened the largest takes him at exactly the price it wrote — not one raise above the runner-up. So the question stops being "can I outlast them" and becomes "what is he actually worth to me".

Two envelopes with the same number do not settle it by luck. The lot is sealed again above the tie, and anybody who wrote less is out of it. Online, each lot gives the table 30 seconds to write; a seat that has not answered when it runs out sits that lot out and keeps its money. At one device there is no clock at all: the panel is handed round, and nobody can be outbid while they wait.

Sitting out costs nothing, except on the lots you call yourself. Sit out three of your own lots in a row and the next one you call opens with your $1M already sealed; anyone else can still write more. It stops the last seat with room from passing on every lot until a star walks out. Writing any envelope starts the count again.

Where he plays is decided after you have won him

When the hammer falls you choose which of your open slots the player fills. Not before — after.

Deciding position and price at the same time asks a bidder to solve two problems while a clock runs, and only one of them is urgent. Separating them also means the position picker can show you what he would actually rate in each slot, so the choice between playing a guard out of position and leaving a hole is a comparison rather than a guess.

A player at his natural position gets +3 to his rating, and +1 at a secondary position he genuinely played. Out of position he simply gets neither.

The estimate

Every lot carries a price band — what the room reckons he fetches, given who is still available. Beating it is the game. A bidder holding a hundred million and five slots has no natural sense of whether twelve for an 87 is a steal or a disaster, and the estimate is the answer to that.

Budget per remaining slot is shown alongside it. That is what you can average if you spend evenly, so a price above it is a price you are choosing to make up somewhere else.

Chemistry

Five good players are not automatically a good team. Chemistry judges the shape of your roster: whether anybody can create a shot, whether you have shooting, whether somebody protects the rim, whether your usage adds up to a functioning offence, and how far apart in era your five are.

Crucially it is judged against the pool you are bidding from, not against a fixed ideal. On the all-time scale every roster is full of high-usage scorers from wildly different decades, so measuring that against a modern team would hand everybody the same penalty and tell you nothing. The bar moves with the field.

The match

When the last slot is filled, the two rosters play. The simulation is driven by the ratings you bought and the chemistry you assembled, and it produces a real scoreline: four quarters, a box score for all ten players, and a card you can send to the person you just beat.

The result is fixed once it is played. Refreshing will not deal you a new one.

Ways to play

• Against the computer. Four difficulties. It never gets extra money — only better judgement.
• Two players, one device. Take the paddle in turns and hand it over when a lot closes.
• Someone else, somewhere else. Start a room and send its six-character code, join with a code somebody sent you, or pick a game off the list of rooms still looking for players.
• League of eight. Three to eight bidders over one pool, outcry or silent. At one device you say how many of the seats are people: one is you against seven computers, four is four of you passing it round with four computers making up the numbers. Online, every seat is a person, each on their own screen.

How a league is decided

Every seat still fills five slots from a hundred million, so a league has five lots per seat: forty at eight seats, about four times as long as a two-player sale. There are two ways to finish it. In a round robin, once the last lot has gone, every roster plays every other roster once — twenty-eight games at eight seats — and the table is ordered on wins, then points difference, then who beat whom. The top two then play one game for the title.

Which means the table can be topped by a roster that does not end up champion. A fifteen-point favourite still loses about one night in six, and the final is one night. That is the trade a knockout makes, and it is the reason the standings are printed above the final rather than under it: twenty-eight games are better evidence about a five than one is.

In a season, every seat first takes over a real franchise — online, the first to press a club gets it — and then plays that club's 82-game schedule against the rest of the league, followed by the playoffs. The other clubs are not idle: they play too, so the conference you land in matters.

Either way, the ending shows what each seat's five actually did: points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks per game for every player, so you can see which of your purchases were worth the money. The averages cover the round robin or the 82 games; the final and the playoffs are reported as themselves.

Choosing the field

This season rates every player on what he is doing right now. All-time opens it to every era, each player at his peak. Then pick how deep the pool goes — the top 60 is brutal, because only twelve complete teams exist in it and every hole you leave is one somebody else fills.

Playing online

Type a name before you take a seat and that is what the table sees; leave it blank and the room numbers you. Use a nickname rather than your full name. A room is either private, reachable only with its code, or public, which also puts it on the list of games looking for players. Nothing is called until every seat is taken.

The clocks are the room's. Calling a lot has 30 seconds and placing a player you have won has 25; run out and the room does it for you. If your connection drops the room holds your seat, and after 45 seconds away the computer plays it for you until you come back — at which point it is yours again. Refreshing the page puts you straight back in your seat. A room that is full, or a code nobody has opened, says so rather than leaving you waiting.