Talk:Ponzi!
From Ludocity
Posted at 17:44, 28 March 2009Kevan said:
Posted at 12:44, 30 March 2009Ben Henley said:
If the available trades were on a deck of cards, the cards could only include colours which are in play, so you'd need different decks for different numbers of players.
If I was moderating this, I might struggle to make up something sensible - I would rather have a random mechanism. Also randomness kind of fits with the theme of the game.
I think maybe drawing marbles from a top hat, then rolling a die/dice for the reward scale?
Seems good; a simple core goal, and plenty of reason for the players to muddy it with desperation and selfishness.
I think you can probably simplify the role of the Hand, though, and just have the moderator standing up periodically to announce the Full Will of the Market - given that players are going to be diversifying a lot anyway, to pre-empt future Hand calls, it won't make much difference to announce a particular colour in advance.
The strong incentive to diversify might be a problem in that, a few rounds in, most players will be able to match any short pattern of beads. I don't know if "three for ten" was a general example, but you might need to bump it up to a pattern of five or seven, or scale down the rewards.
Can the moderator just make it all up in his head, for the Invisible Hand details? I can't see any benefit to it being diligently random, although I may be missing something. (I'm not sure what you mean by the possible need to "create a card set for an exact number of players".) Making it up on the spot would certainly be useful for letting the moderator play it by ear, on the first playtest.