I tend to agree with MHaye. While I was around for the beginning of trading I didn’t have 5 minutes alone to really do anything serious trading and made a couple of really stupid mistakes early on. I forgot how the last game of Haggle started:smack: And once you’re out of the loop and other people have seen 10 rules and you have seen only 4 or 5 you’re pretty much screwed unless something fortuitous happens like me and my pennies.
It’s easy to get discouraged in this game and the only reason I kept playing was because a couple of NAF’s statements made it seem that I wasn’t quite as far behind as I thought. That and my decision to collect pennies.
The auction was the killer though. I bid everything but my pennies and still couldn’t come close to winning it. Maybe in the future if someone drops out their stuff should dissappear and I don’t know maybe a dice role on their rules.
I know valuing each coin for what it was worth during the auction wouldn’t have worked. But maybe random assigning each coin a value would have worked better. What? no, I’m not bitter that my pennies were only worth 1 cent and NAF’s toonie alone was worth almost twice the total amount of all of my coins and my rules put together.
I’m not sure I’ll play this again. It all moves a little too fast for me.
Anyway, it was fun. Thanks Chrisk. I know it was hard work.
Yeah, it wasn’t the best choice I admit. In doing research for this game, I came across a few references to ‘trick’ rules like that, and I almost certainly piled on too many for a first try - one bonus rule and three rules that made up 2 ‘base value’ systems were nullified, in addition to the double fake-out for the true base value system. I’m not sure I entirely agree with your reasoning about 17 being ‘key’, especially since it depends on a player following his curiosity from 17 to see what it’s contradicting instead of concentrating on other rules that are presumably ‘live’, but as I wasn’t a player I can’t say for sure.
Rule sets being too unbalanced is a key problem though. I should have put a bit more care into it, and maybe recruited a ‘sounding board’ who agreed not to participate, like NAF volunteered to be for Dragon’s hoard.
I agree with your thoughts about the auction-in-kind, but I do like auctions because they allow the remaining players to go after the items that they most want, or most want to keep out of the hands of rivals, and to put the information that they’ve already acquired to best use.
The problem is how to best do that without allowing certain players who might already be ‘in the lead’ to leverage that advantage to gain even more.
One idea I’m wondering about is the idea of issuing ‘auction currency’ for every auction - all remaining players get 1 million yen to put on the items up for auction, say. Each item is won by the person who committed the most yen to it, and all yen are worthless once the auction is over. It’s a little disappointing for somebody who might split his points between 2 things and be outbid on each, or who devotes everything to a single item and has to lose on a tiebreaker, but I think there’s some value to the idea.
That seems like a better way to go. In that case everyone has at least a chance of success. Way better than the situation where one has NO chance of success even when wagering everything against someone who can wager one item of many and essentially best all players with no real detriment to their portfolio.
17 as worded seemed to be aware of other rules, besides 9. The Finality of 17 with “no other rule contradicts this one” kinda tipped the hand.
Also, you made it the last rule in the list.
One or the other, might not have tipped it, but taking both, it did.
I think at least, a better player would want to have seen 9, to know what everyone else was doing. Much like Sinjin with pennies. Knowing what 9 was, it would help get an upper hand.
9 in turn pointed to 2.
My Freak out came when I checked all the lower Valuation rules to each other, and I did not check them to the higher “Not so” rules.
It finally clicked in, that you couldn’t have multiple base valuations. To be fair, 8 was revised, so at the moment, it stalled me.
Like I said, I knew 2 was going to be it for a while. Naf picked f i g h t, I picked f l i g h t.
Oh, and well played Mahaloth. I forgot to mention that before. NAF, although we’re all complaining about the way things went down, you played to win and won: well done! While reading back looking for something else today I came across something you said about playing to win all out (I’m not going back to look) and I thought yeah, totally NAF.
I don’t know. I think, considering that it was an April fools themed game, it wasn’t too bad. The big problems were people dropping out.
Chrisk, if I were to make a suggestion it would be to have set trading period that are short in durration and that start over with everyone at an even level of knowledge. So you have 5 rounds of trading at set times and valuation for each round, then a new rule set for the next round.
It would be a ton more work to set up, but might fail safe the problem of “those who are around to trade when trading starts get to win.”
I think I won this before I got JSG’s bank. Being able to buy Justin’s bank for the pound really put the game away for me. I had over 250 at that point. But I made some good trades before then and pulled myself up to a solid 3rd place before then.
NAF : FWIW :: Magic The Gathering is basically Mafia, only way, way, way more so. In a lot less time.
You can get started in Magic for 20 bucks. 10 bucks if you already know another player. You don’t need more than 60 cards - ever. BUT [Translated into Mafiaese for you]
More cards essentially allow you to have more citizens, an in turn, those citizens have new and different roles. Magic has been around for 15+ years they put out more citizens and powers and one shots in themed expansion sets. You can’t blame them because, they like money too.
MAGIC is complicated, but, given that you play Mafia, and that you have some experience in Dungeons and Dragons, and play Haggle excellently, Im fairly sure you will pick up Magic in 5 minutes.
Meeko, stop trying to entice NAF away from mafia with other trivial pursuits. He barely has time for us and his wife and his job as it is. When little Ada Danger is born we will have even less of him than we do now. Cut it out already.
NAF, I used to play magic and it is a deadly treadmill to get caught on. However for just playing for fun you can often find giant lots of cards cheap. That’s what I have now myself, one box of a few thousand mixed junk cards that I got for $20 and that’s more than enough for people to tinker with for friendly games.
Hmm… okay, so basically each round is a seperate event, with the scoring just added up to try and eliminate unfair distributions in any particular round by averaging? Like playing a rubber of Bridge or a first-to-ten match of Euchre? Sounds possible?
Or will all the rounds use the same trading counters - so after you’ve been scored for round 1, you get new rule slips for round 2, but start with the same counters you’ve just been scored on, which suddenly have new values?
Either way could work, but would be a LOT of work to organize. I’d be more interested in trying a blitz game, where we agree on 6 hours, say, and all participants check to make sure that they’ll be online and ready to trade for a significant portion of that agreed-on time.
Regarding early scores, you’re probably right on with that assessment NAF. One thing that I was surprised at in the early scoring, once I got my own calcuators going, was that Mahaloth seemed to have pulled into an early lead, with his nickels and dimes, and some high valued base coins, and nobody seemed to have realized it, even Mahaloth
It’s true. I realized I was doing fairly well when people wouldn’t offer me any more coins for things. There was a good two day period where it felt like no one was going to give me any coins for rules or coin exchanges.
I think NAF or MHaye even said something like, “No one will be giving you any coins any time soon…”
That was when I realized, despite having few rules, I must be doing OK. I did not think I was in the lead, however, at any point.
I realized it pretty quick once I got my spreadsheet up and the reason I was prodding NAF to calculate scores was because I saw he was about to trade Mahaloth a major piece.
I think the bidding on the first auction was the only real problem in the game mainly because no one could touch NAF and it was for the total stash so even if would all had a chance who ever won would have won the game.
The most interesting thing for me was Meeko told me what rule 8 was when I got 4 quarters. I hadn’t seen the rule and if he hadn’t told me I probably would have traded away my quarters for other pieces. I hadn’t seen any rules for what quarters were worth and I just gambled that trading NAF the Fifty Cent piece for two quarters was a win for me because with more pieces you have the more chances to trade you have.
The other interesting thing was that when Mahaloth picked up his nickel and dime artist he also had the penny lead. So I figured that it would be good to tie him up and at least remove that bonus so that later I could take the lead and even if I didn’t if brought him 50 points closer to the rest of us. But I think too many people saw the penny rule early on and it was impossible to trade for pennies. Except for Sin, who did great work with the whole I’m giving up and just want to collect pennies. Once she had the bonus at 5 I figured there was no harm in trading with her anymore as long as I got fair value.
I thought of another way to structure the game that I thought might be interesting. Haggle Auction Mania.
Nobody is issued any rule slips or counters to start with - only the auction currency. (Call it 1 million yen.) Auction currency will NOT count at all towards the final score. (Or probably not - unless this is contradicted by a rule slip.)
All rule slips and counters are put up for auction, in stages. Once you win items in auctions, the yen that you have bid on them is gone forever, and you cannot bid as much in later auctions as people who possibly didn’t win anything at the initial auctions.
Digger, we did have the history there. I had set the precedent for doing that tactic. (Not sure how the previous 2 haggle games went, but at least, personally, I had set a precedent for doing it.) Digger was getting a “fixed” double copper rule, and the situation there was just too delicious to pass up. If I could beat you by dropping a rule in Hoard, I would have to beat you in foolishness by dropping a rule again. – Exactly backwards. Perfect Sequel situation.
**
I thought you had seen 8 before I did it. Even so, I don’t believe you had to “activate” 8. Chrisk, one could havve gotten 5 quarters, and still have gotten the bonus, without ever seeing 8. Correct?**
The disadvantage of showing you 8, we negated by everyone else seeing 8. However, if what you say is true, I probably shouldn’t have dropped 8. I think that was the key issue for Just Some Guy.
For the most part, if the game had stayed on track I remain convinced that you, or I for that matter, would not have gotten the 5th quarter.
In spite of doing the EXACT same tactic in the last haggle game, I remain surprsied that I, and JSG for that matter both got deals in on 8 after the fact.
The entire idea of Haggle REALLY hit home for me, the moment I figured I could create doubt on what I had just did. That was the moment I realized that I could pull something out of the fire and use it again.
Well, I did try to play up some value for 8 and I think it helped that there was an air of distrust at that point.
chrisk, if you want to think about auction mechanics in games then you need to examine the work of Dr. Knizia. The man loves his auctions; especially ones with limited player information. I think that starting out auctioning is cute but you really introduce difficult choices if you give players a tiny fragment of data to base their pricing on first.
Cut it out already.