Hobson's Horses

This auction game for four or five players is the 2024 Hollandays Sale Freebie.

Thomas Hobson (1544-1631) was the owner of a livery stable. To prevent his best horses from always being chosen and thus overused, he rotated his horses and required his customers to choose the horse whose stall was closest to the door. This has been passed down to us as the idiom "Hobson's Choice": Take what is offered, or take none.

In this game, players have sneaked a peek at the rotation for the day, and know what horses will be offered in which order. Each player will bid a discrete amount of time. The player who bids the most got up the earliest and will be arriving first, taking the first horse. The player who bid the next highest takes the second horse, and so on, with the player who bid the least taking no horse at all!

These horses each have two scoring criteria, and depending on which horses you've ridden in which order, these criteria might result in positive or negative points. The player with the highest score wins.

—description from the publisher