Is anybody else interested in being a Hagglemaster?

Yay, new game room. Love the comfy chairs! :smiley:

Okay, I’ve run ‘Haggle’ twice and had fun doing it, generally considered a success. Anybody else interested in giving the spot of gamerunner a try, either with me in the trading pit, or standing off in the audience, watching, available for emergency help if truly needed? :wink:

link roundup:
New Doper party game idea - Haggle - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board (teaser)
Haggle - a game of trading and secrets - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board (Haggle 1: spelling dope)
Anybody up for a holiday round of Haggle? - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board (Haggle 2: holiday bargain madness)

If there’s any interest, I’m going to try to upgrade my haggle tracking software so that it can be as turnkey as possible - whoever makes up the rules can simply type or copy his pieces, rules, etcetera in to start with, then log trades, get PMs and updates, and maybe a bit of basic scoring where the rules aren’t too complicated. It’ll need windows and some basic ODBC drivers to run.

A few thoughts on my experiences running the game. Coming up with the rules and assigning individual portfolios is always the most stressful part - once the starting bell is rung the job is half over or so. It always seems at the start like too many people aren’t participating, like nobody will actually manage to make a trade… but things usually work out okay.
So… how about it? :slight_smile:

I don’t think I could commit to being HaggleMaster, but I’m posting here because I would definitely like to join a game if someone else starts one up. I just read through the first game and it looks like fun (and it makes much more sense to me than Mafia does :wink: )

I want to be in the game too. I am not running ANY game for a while. You-Solve-It took it out of me, but I really like playing haggle (even if I usually lose…by a lot.)

That’s fair. Okay, well, since I’ve signed up for the new mafia, I’m not going to push Haggle hard. This thread can float around and anybody interested in participating either way can sound off. We’ll get a game together sooner or later. :smiley:

I’m interested, though I’ve never played. I’ll need help getting going.

Okay, now that I’ve been vigged off mafia, I’m bumping this thread again. :slight_smile:

Mahaloth, I’ve just clued in that you might have been meant you’re interested in running a game. I’m not sure I’d recommend that for anybody who hasn’t played, but you could email me, (I’m pretty sure emails are available from my profile,) and talk about it.
I’ve also been wondering about trying a wheel-n-deal bargaining game with a different ‘shtick’ than Haggle - no hidden rules trading. Specifically, I had an odd notion about a way to include the ‘bumping off’ factor from Haggle.

  • Each player owes on a mortgage. The mortgages are divided into three shares, distributed so that nobody holds their a share of their own mortgage, and no two players start out holding a share of each other’s mortgage.

  • If Adam gets all three shares of Bert’s mortgage, he can at any time declare that he’s foreclosing on Bert. The mortgage gets torn up, but Bert is out of the game, and all of his assets, including any mortgage shares that he holds, go to Adam.
    The play patterns around this would be interesting to follow I think. Anybody who could get a share of their own mortgage would be virtually immune to the threat of foreclosure, which would be a huge advantage, so everybody would want to be able to do that and never let somebody else do that. The sweetest achievement, perhaps, would be to foreclose on somebody who holds one or two shares of your own mortgage. :smiley: