RE: [haggis] out of town

["Sullivan, William J" <wills@bu.edu>]

Eric said some things:

>Ok.  I'm going to be mostly away from the machine
>until Monday, so don't wait for me to start a game. 
>You'll just have to have less fun.
>

I also have a weekend of traveling ahead of me. But that means you'll all have more fun.

>I'm seeing that my spreading rules around like herpes
>has led some people to realize that people knowing a
>lot of rules is a bad thing.  The game is supposed to
>be about trading cards.  Here are my parting ideas - I
>think they're not all repeats, and I don't think I
>said all of them first:
>
>Break the game into rounds like Werewolf.  A round
>ends when everyone accepts a trade or 24 hours.  
>

I'm not against this... make it more PBeM style. but how do we decide where to limit? Everyone can accept a trade if they all trade with me giving me a bunch of trades to everyone else's one.

>Only one rule can be traded at a time.
>
>Only one rule traded per day round.  Any number of
>cards.
>

If the game is in rounds, I don't see a real problem with these. I think in a "limited" game you can spend a turn learning rules.  So perhaps you can learn one rule per turn without penalty but if you learn more than one rule you cannot gain any cards.

>Three round game:  Start with one rule.  Add one rule
>each round.  Game is scored each round.
>

When does this cross the line to "random winner" game without strategy? I get a rule on the third round telling me that even though I've been collecting the best suit in the game, who ever has the most of that suit loses. people are going to get very suspicious when I try ditching the suit I've been saving for 2 rounds. Is the score each round based on all the rules that will be in the game? maybe that would give a preemptive warning to collecting a suit that is going to burn you.

>Each player gets a personal rule that affects only
>them:  "Red is worth opposite for you"  "Blue and
>Green are switched for you".  This should mean people
>can collect crap suits and still score.
>

I'm all for personal rules. even if you don't get your own personal rule. I can get "Red is worth opposite for Swift"

>Get rid of the lowball rule completely.  
>

Please! If you know going into the game that highest score wins there may even be less rule trading because people can just ignore learning rules and show their rule cards off to get cards. The person with the most cards will most likely win.