Pitting players against each other was interesting. When designing this challenge, I devoted a decent amount of thought to troll-proofing – the reason you have a finite budget is so players bidding unreasonably high could do limited damage – but what actually threatened to derail the scenario was cooperation; even in a zero-sum winner-take-all system, two of the seven entries were “1sp on everything”. If there had been a few more bidders like that, and/or if more than one of them had happened to end up in the same universe, this could have been a very different game.
The specter of super-rationality.