April Foolishness Haggle. [Game in progress]

The Game Room
1

I’m starting a MUCH BETTER thread this time, since last week’s didn’t really take off, and it’s been pointed out that I ‘phoned’ the OP in. :smiley: Let’s start with the Frequently Answered Questions:

So, what is this Haggle thing anyway?

Haggle is a parlour trading game that we’ve been playing occasionally on the SDMB for about 2 years now. (There have only been 3 occasions so far.) The basic idea is that each player starts with a slightly different portfolio of ‘trading counters’, and the objective is to make trades so as to end up with the most valuable collection by the end of the game.

The twist is that each player also starts with a few ‘rule slips’ that contain information about how different counters are valued - usually what the ‘base’ values of each counter by itself is, and then special bonuses or other cases where this might be changed. Other players have different rules that you don’t know at the start of the game, and you can trade in information by letting other people see the rules that you have slips for.

How many people do we need for an enjoyable game?

I’d say anywhere from five to a dozen.

What are the color and number rules for trade offers?

I try not to be a rule nazi, but to make my life easier running the game, please color your official trading statements like this:

Chrisk offer #2: I’ll give anybody a small floppy disk in exchange for a purple flash drive.

Accept Littlechap offer #4

Withdraw offer #3

Also number or otherwise identify all of your trades, (numbers are easiest on me, but if you want to use another scheme that seems clear, go ahead and give it a try.) Please don’t identify responses to offers that have been made to you as ‘counter-offers’ - it just gets confusing from there.

Don’t kid yourself - you’re the Rules Hitler. What else would piss you off?

It’s all common sense stuff. Don’t offer an item you don’t have for a trade, or a look at a rule that you don’t HOLD - and asking for the same out of another person isn’t really a good idea either.

All of this seems so confusing - can I see some examples?

Yes. Not long after this OP, I will be providing you with bunches of examples from real Haggle games from the SDMB.

How long will this take, and how is the game organized?

This is pretty simple really.

There’s the signup stage, where players decide that they’re interested, and I take down their names.

Possibly a brief delay after signups are closed during which I finalize the rules and the starting packages, and everybody confirms to an initial game PM. Might even have to scramble for a replacement or a smaller pool of players.

I’ll post a ‘kickoff’ describing each player’s trading counters and identifying their rule slips by number. Then the text of the rule slips are PM-ed to each player. Once that is done, I’ll post again in the thread to ‘ring the trading bell’ and get things going.

We’re probably going to take a few days getting organized, and trade for a little over a week, which will take us nearly to the end of April. At a pre-defined deadline, further trading is disallowed, and any player has a little time to decide if they want to ‘sink’ any of their score counters, (throw it away because it would hurt their overall score,) and then I run the final score and make a long drawn out process of announcing the results and getting to the final winner.

What if other people stop paying attention to the game, so I can’t trade?

This is something that’s been a bit of a problem. Please, don’t sign up if you don’t think that you’ll be participating for most of the week. In general, if there are a few Hagglers who don’t participate, they mostly hurt themselves, but they can also throw a few things out of whack because their counters aren’t really available for trading and the rule slips that they hold can be monopolized by the person who has the other copy.

Can you tell me anything cool about the rules this time around?

Not much, really. It may involve coins of some kind. And there will probably be rules that invalidate other rules, like “Rule #15: rule #5 is complete and utter hogwash.” If rule #15 is not invalidated in its turn, then rule #5 will not truly have any effect on the scoring.

And what about the previous games? Where can I see all of those?

Haggle 1: Spelling dope - Haggle - a game of trading and secrets - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board
Haggle 2: Holiday bargain madness - Anybody up for a holiday round of Haggle? - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board
Haggle 3: The dragon’s hoard - Haggle: The Dragon's hoard [closed] - The Game Room - Straight Dope Message Board

2

What can I say I’m a bit of a whore for this game. I am so in.

3

Get your examples here.

I’m going to mostly draw examples from ‘Holiday Haggle’ http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=446660&highlight=haggle, December of 2007, because it was sort of the smallest and easiest to understand.

First, here’s the kickoff post:

This should be fairly easy to understand, but let’s go through it in a bit more detail. The named items like ‘blue box’ and ‘red tree’ are trading counters, worth points. Each player starts with five rules and the same rule number repeats 2 or 3 times among the set of players. Rule text is not listed here, of course, because it’s secret information.

The only reason that ‘has seen rules’ appears in this post is because I generated it with my usual mid-game update function. Nobody starts off having seen a rule that they don’t hold a copy of, but it’ll happen a lot once trading starts. More on that later.

The full rule set from this game is listed below:

There’s a number of interesting things in this particular set that I could point out. Base value of each counter depends only on its shape/type, (can, tree, etcetera,) and not its color. Then the notion of ‘having control/sharing control’ of a color is introduced in its own rule, followed by the specific implications of that rule with each color. Notice that if you have any of rules 8-15 but not 7, you might not understand the criteria for the bonuses and modifiers mentioned, and if you have only 7 but not any of the others, you have no idea how having or sharing control might affect your score.

I was a bit irrationally proud of the ‘stealing christmas’ rule, and hoped that at least one player would try for it, and come up against a coalition determined to stop him or her, which did sort of happen. Notice also that sharing control of white has a negative point impact, partly as a disincentive for trying to steal christmas and failing.

And finally there’s a small selection of rules that apply to a particular shape-color match.

The first trade that was finalized started with

This led to:

And also:

But at this point Rev pointed out that he hadn’t specified that he’d be willing to repeat the trade, so it was off the table once it was accepted.

To get to a sample trade that involves actual trading counter, we’ll follow a slightly more involved series of negotiations - in my next post.

4

This is a good example of some back-and-forthing on a deal involving rules and items. Note that there was a rule copier in this game, so that RT could ‘copy’ rule 7 and let Hal show it to other people, that will not be the case this time around.

And Hal was not actually setting up a different series of numbers for his counteroffers - he hadn’t made any of his own offers at this point in the game, as far as I can tell. :slight_smile:

5

I am totally in. Maybe I won’t finish in last place this time.

6

Sign me up!

7

Players list:
Oredigger77
NAF1138
Mahaloth

8

I’m In.

You better believe it.

-Meeko

Who is slightly peeved that ChrisK didn’t tell him that the sign ups were back on.

9

::Looks to OreDigger::

Can I take any copper off your hands, again, again ?

10

Does that make me the Haggle Prostitute?

11

When someone gets to see another person’s rule, does that player PM it to them, or does the mod do that?

12

Chrisk Does a LOT for the game.

In the Haggle game I played, PM between players was not allowed. Chrisk stays on top of it all.

13

Which is the main reason why no one but Chrisk runs these things. They are awesome, but must be a hellish amount of work to run on a message board.

14

Ok cool. I’ll think about playing.

It might be fun sometime to do a Mafia/Haggle game where the players PM each other the rules, only a few players are scum and they are allowed to lie about their rules. :smiley: Or that might be so complicated as to overload the hamsters and break the message board in half.

15

Ah. A Mafia player then.

Haggle goes a lot faster than Mafia.

There is no limit to how many actions you make. There is no time structure built into the general idea of the game.

You can do it all and then some in this game, next to any time you wish.

Jump in, drink the kool aid

The second (out of game) day you are playing it,** your brain will melt**, and your ideas of traditional deal making and trading will go out the window.

At that point, Haggle will own you.

And you will be one of us.

Congratulations.
-Meeko

Who will probably now watch ChrisK implement new timing rules into this version of haggle.

16

As a mafia player…I support this post. I love mafia, but I am skipping a mafia game on the Giraffe Boards that will probably be fairly good so I can play in this latest round of Haggle.

17

Players list:
Oredigger77
NAF1138
Mahaloth
Meeko
Justin Credible

Meeko - I knew that you’d find me without a PM. :smiley:

Rule PMs between players to complete a trade has never been disallowed. However, I do get a bit huffy if:

  • the PMs contain anything other than the correct text of the rules that have been traded.
  • You don’t copy me on the PM so that I can verify the above.
  • There is any problem with the legality of the trade, such as one player not owning the rule slip he/she is trading free and clear.

I do pride myself on staying on top of the trade PMs myself, and have been gradually refining the tracking software I use to manage the game.
When I came back and saw that there were 9 new posts in this game since I checked in around 5:30, I was actually thinking that there were suddenly a heap of new players. Turns out that there’s only a few but a lot of chatter. That’s great too. :smiley:

18

Okay, I guess I’ll play, since you already signed me up and all.

19

Let me see if I have a basic understanding of the game:

  1. We are given two separate things: rules and items

  2. The goal is to end the game with the most valuable collection of stuff, as defined by the rules. I assume some kind of currency/points are used to calculate value.

  3. We can trade items and rules in order to increase our total worth and our understanding of the game rules.

Right or totally wrong or somewhat on target?

20

Whoops, sorry, so excited I guess I jumped the gun. I shouldn’t have done that.

:slight_smile: