Re: [pbmserv-dev] suggested game: Sid Sackson's Haggle

[mballinger@fibres.net]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 02:07:33PM -0700, Lyman Hurd wrote:
> I suggest the game Haggle by Sid Sackson (described in
> his book "A Gamut of Games").  There are some real
> similarities to Werewolf in that it is massively
> multiplayer and much of the game play consists of
> chat.

This sounds great.

> 2) The purpose of the game is to submit a set of cards
> yielding the maximum possible score.  There has to be
> some way to indicate an end at which everyone has to
> have submitted their hands (this could be a fixed time
> limit like 24 hours, or a command from a designated
> master of ceremonies).

Or a counting-down number of trades.  We all see something like "lyman traded 2 cards to markball's 4 cards.  There are 47 trades left in the game."

> 3) The point values are determined by a large set of
> rules (one per player): examples might include:
> 
> The catch is that every player is shown only two
> (different) rules and every rule is shown to two
> players

It would be interesting to see the possible different rules.

> The only actions in the game are:
> 3) submit <hand> (submit a hand for final scoring)
> 
> turn in a subset of the cards in your possession.

I don't get this part.  Why bother?

> 5) accept
> 
> Accept a trade.  Maybe this should have the same form
> as the proposal so one knows which trade one is
> accepting.

Just have the server number the proposals sequentially.  Then let the other player "accept" or "reject"  The proposer could have a "withdraw" command.

> I thought there might be enough overlap with WW
> functionality that it might be most easily implemented
> in Perl.

. . . says the c++ coder!  I'm the guy who missed one "!" in perl today and screwed up the game!