Yes, it’s another IMHO thread inspired by those wacky Mafia game threads!
I’m interested in running a slightly different kind of party game thread here on the board. The game that I want to do is from an old book of games that my Dad had, called Haggle. It’s a game of bargaining and trading, as the title might suggest, a thinking person’s game - a game where even figuring out the rules is a struggle.
This thread has been started for the purpose of finding out how many people might be interested in playing, and opening discussion on the rules and mechanics of play.
Here’s how it generally works. The MC, (or one of the players, if everything has been arranged beforehand by someone who couldn’t be there,) hands out packages to each player, including some valuable game tokens, of whatever type and distinctions desired, and also numbered rule slips. The slips, taken as a whole, form a set of rules determining how a ‘portfolio’ of tokens would be scored or evaluated at the end of the game.
Players are free to make just about any deals they like in the hopes of amassing a killer portfolio, based on, but not limited to, the three main types of transactions:
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One player giving another a token
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One player showing another a rule slip, letting them read it and memorizing it, and then taking it back
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One player giving another a rule slip.
For instance, a proposed deal might be, “Hey Joe - if you let me take a good look at rule #16, and throw in that green card, I’ll give you rule #5. You can’t beat that offer!”
As you might imagine, there’s always a fine line to walk between the tokens and rule slips - don’t give up too many tangible assets in exchange for information, but you need to accumulate enough information to tell you what the tokens are really worth.
There may be ‘white elephant’ tokens that have a generally negative effect, however these can be left out of the portfolio if the player is aware of their impact - similarly, a particular bonus rule might require that only so many of a given counter be submitted - the excess can be discarded before the end of game. Also as an example of trickiness, there can be rules that completely revoke other rules.
And, at the end of the night, everybody hands in their portfolios for evaluation, and a winner is determined according to the rules from the slips.
So, those are the basic rules. Here are a few of my thoughts about adapting it to a message board environment:
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For the same reasons as in Mafia/Werewolf, restrict all game-related contact between players to the thread. No deals can be proposed, accepted, or rejected in secret. Everybody can see what everyone else is doing, (if they can keep up with the thread.)
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Players could agree to work together in principle, pooling their information and assets beyond a quid pro quo, but not plan strategy in secret - But see variations listed below.
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The tokens and which NUMBER rule slips a player holds are always visible to all, once the moderator has caught up on recent trades and posted an update.
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Binding trade offers and acceptances are marked off in special colours, like voting and unvoting in mafia. This will make it easier for the mod to find completed trades, and signify to other players what’s a binding offer and what’s just bargaining chatter. Maybe also some other systemic way of keeping this manageable, so that it isn’t just:
Joe: Bill, I’ll show you 11 if you show me fourteen
(two pages later)
Bill: Joe - you’ve got a deal!
(And I need to figure out what the offer Joe made to Bill was.)
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All trade offers made as above are binding unless they are withdrawn before being accepted. Offers may be limited to one player, to certain players, or thrown open for anybody in the game who can fufill them.
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Offers can be made that are one-sided, ‘I’ll give you this, I’ll show you that’, but they must STILL be accepted as a matter of protocol.
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End of game would be determined at the beginning - possibly in two stages, a ‘trade deadline’ and a ‘portfolio deadline’ shortly after, so that after the trades are done each player can review their final portfolio and make any final decisions necessary.
A few possible variations, mostly to do with partnerships or secret communications:
Partners from the start: Two (or more) board members can agree to form a team before the starting portfolios are handed out. They receive one package of tokens and rule slips, no bigger or better than anyone else’s, but can communicate in secret with each other off the board. They submit one portfolio at the end of the game and are generally considered only one ‘player’ in game terms. Any offers, acceptances, or giveaways by one team member are binding on the partner or partners. (Unless an offer is withdrawn before it is accepted, which is generally a perogative of all players.)
Partners by contract: All players start out solo, with their own packages, but can agree to team up with a binding offer and acceptance, like any other deal. Once the offer is accepted, both player’s rules and tokens are merged, and they become a single player as in the variation above, able to communicate secretly off the board.
Whisper me a rule: Trade offers can include a new option, whispering a rule that has been seen seen instead of showing the rule slip, for example because the player whispering doesn’t have the rule slip. Whispers need not be accurate or indeed actually about the rule slip involved, and would therefore represent a possible conduit for secret messages between players. However, something like the following rules would pertain:
- Whispers are all caveat emptor, no complaining about their content once the transaction is concluded. (Unless they included inappropriate language etcetera, maybe.)
- All whispers must be ‘about’ a numbered rule, at least theoretically. You can’t whisper about a rule that you haven’t seen or gotten a previous whisper about from somebody else. (Possibly you can’t whisper about a rule if you actually HOLD it and could deal to show it.)
- You can’t contract to get a whisper about a rule that you hold or have seen. However, you can whisper about the same rule number to many different people, and receive whispers about the same rule from different people, so as to compare different versions.
- You can’t whisper about the same rule to the same person, or to someone who whispered about the rule to you.
- If a deal offer involves more than one whisper, the players can time the whispers however they like. If they can’t come to an agreement about that, the entire deal is voided.
Auctions: To break up the length of the game and add some structure, the moderator might hold auctions in the middle of play period, offering new rule slips or valuable tokens to whoever is willing to pay the most for them. (Probably for auction rules, tokens will be ‘priced’ in a deliberately simplistic way, as if they’re all equal, so whoever can pay the most tokens in an auction will win, no matter how much or how little they’re worth in the final scoring.)
Okay, I think I’ve rambled long enough at this point. Anybody interested in this sort of thing??
