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.