Filed November 3, 2026
How to play Uncle Sold
Uncle Sold is the daily government auction guessing game. Every day, 5 case files come up from the cabinet. Each one is a real thing Uncle Sam sold at a public auction: a boat, a dump truck, an aircraft, a pallet of office chairs. You guess the winning bid. The closer you get, the farther the drawer flies, and your day is measured in feet of files.
One file at a time
- Open today's file. A folder rises out of the drawer with a photo, what the lot is, which agency sold it, where it was and its condition.
- Set your bid on the price dial. It runs from $10 to $10,000,000 on a log scale, so a $400 Jeep and a $600,000 aircraft both fit. Drag the dial, or nudge it up or down by about 5% with the − and + buttons. On a computer the arrow keys and the mouse wheel nudge it too (Shift doubles or halves it), and Enter files your bid.
- File it. You get one bid per lot, and it can't be changed.
- The real winning bid is stamped across the screen, the drawer flies out, and you see how your guess compared with everyone else's.
A new file opens every day at midnight Eastern time. Everyone gets the same 5 lots.
The auction clock
Each lot has a 30-second clock that starts when the folder opens. It turns amber at 10 seconds and red at 5, and the auctioneer calls "going once" and "going twice" at the end. At zero the lot is sold at whatever the dial shows. If you never touched the dial, that counts as no bid: Misfiled, 0 feet. Moving the dial with a keyboard or a screen reader doubles the clock, for that lot and the rest of the day.
Feet of files
Each lot is worth up to 117 feet. What counts is how far off you were as a ratio, so guessing double the price scores the same as guessing half. Being close matters a lot more than being exact:
| Your guess | Feet |
|---|---|
| Within 2% | 117 ft |
| 5% off | 115 ft |
| 10% off | 112 ft |
| 25% off | 101 ft |
| 1.5× off | 81 ft |
| 2× off | 52 ft |
| 5× off | 7 ft |
| 10× off | 1 ft |
The headliner counts double
Lot 5 is the day's headliner. It counts ×2, so it's worth up to 233 feet. A perfect day is 700 feet.
Stamps
Every bid gets a stamp for how close it was. The same stamps make up your share line.
| Stamp | How close | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Hammer Price | Within 2% | |
| Appraiser | Within 10% | |
| Sharp Bidder | Within 25% | |
| Window Shopper | Within 2× either way | |
| Misfiled | Further off than 2× |
A Hammer Price gets the gavel. Your share line shows only stamps and feet, never prices, so posting it doesn't spoil the day for anyone.
Folder colors
The farther your drawer goes, the deeper into the cabinet you reach, and the folders coming out of it change color. A new color shows up at every 100 feet you've pulled today:
| Folder | From |
|---|---|
| Manila | 0 ft |
| Green | 100 ft |
| Blue | 200 ft |
| Red | 300 ft |
| REDACTED | 400 ft |
Past 400 feet the files get strange. The office would rather not say more. Pull far enough and you'll find out.
The crowd
After each lot you see how your guess stacked up against every other clerk's (for example, "closer than 62% of clerks"), and at the end of the day where your total landed on everyone's curve. The chart appears once a lot has enough real bids to mean something. How we keep those numbers honest is on the methodology page.
Good to know
- No account, no sign-up. The game remembers your progress on this device. See privacy.
- Prices stay hidden until you bid, and no page on this site shows today's prices.
- Want to know where the lots come from? Read the methodology, or browse every lighthouse the government has auctioned.