Talk:Ponzi!

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Revision as of 14:17, 30 March 2009 by Kevan (talk | contribs)


Kevan said:

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.

Ben 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?

Kevan said:

Ah, okay, got it. Randomness works, and the props sound good, but I think there's also a lot of thematic flavour to be had from mysterious, omniscient decisions - if the moderator looks thoughtfully around the room before making each call, players will start to develop superstitions about how he's deciding the colours (if he's not asked for any blue tokens, after the first three rounds, then maybe blue tokens are the worthless ones! Sell blue!). Maybe generate them randomly behind a screen, and give the moderator room to fudge them if they feel they need to? (It'd seem a shame to end the game early purely because "10 x red" happened to come up three times in a row for the payout.)

And oh, one idea, from looking at the player numbers - you could scale the game up to take a lot more people by having them form "companies". Instead of one player getting 50 blue beads, five players get 10 blue beads each. Which would have the interesting effect of spreading the "worthless bead" information out a bit - everyone in Greencorp gets told their stock is worthless, so maybe one of them will stand up midgame and blow the whistle on their colleagues, after having offloaded their personal green-bead portfolio. And could be lying.

Kevan said:

Or if you wanted to make sure that the game still worked as well for six as for thirty players, you could total up the score per corporation, at the end, so that each corporation of five people is functionally identical to one human player.