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Re: [haggis] Goals of the game
--- Flig@aol.com wrote:
> The problem is that I don't care much for games that have unknown goals. Swift talks about how
> trading cards is more fun than trading rules, and I agree with that....but when I've traded
> cards, it's been pretty much at random, and it's come back to hurt me more than help.
One problem I've seen with a lot of the Sid Sackson games (and a lot of "cool-sounding" games in
general) is they tend to be a bit "sharp" - if you don't know what you're doing, it's very easy to
trash yourself within a few moves. If your first few experiences at a game are pretty brutal, you
aren't that motivated to get up the learning curve. In haggle/haggis, nobody really knows what
they're doing at the start of *every* game.
I'm not that convinced the initial distribution of rules is all that great. We all start the game
knowing almost nothing (and with a great variance in the value of what we know). 91 has 8 players,
5 cards, presumably 5 basic rules and 7 or 8 special rules. If you decide on a short-term goal,
you'll either find it ends up hurting at the end of the game, or is so transparent that *nobody*
is going to want to trade. (If lots of people want X's, then it's unlikely I'll be giving them
away either even if I don't have the X rule).
swift is right - straight rule-for-rule trades, or even card-for-card trades, are pretty dull, but
going in gung-ho with only a couple of rules tends to hurt eventually. There needs to be some sort
of tradeoff at the start of the game... for instance, maybe each player has to make a choice after
the deal whether to take more cards, or more rules (I have no idea how that would be negotiated).
Maybe there has to be some scoring for "working together" - if you do something such as reveal a
rule that helps everyone, you ought to get credit. (Again, no idea how).
I think the trading in general needs work to make sense on pbem (with timezones and whatever).
Maybe something more than straight trades is needed - perhaps an auction? If someone wants a
daisy... how much are they willing to pay? That allows a trading window, and does at least have a
bit of excitement (because nobody is absolutely sure what their "bid" for an item is really
worth)... it doesn't have to be eBay, just some mechanism better than chat to say "I've got a
daisy... or a rule 3... or whatever... open to offers" that doesn't get lost in the chat. It might
even be that some sort of "initial offers" board for bids and counter-bids might make the openings
not as sharp for everyone. Public bids help everyone get an idea what the values of cards are,
without giving away the rules.