Talk:Ponzi!

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(The Ludocity website previously had integrated forums, but they fell into spam-covered decline and were shut down in 2015. The comments in this section have been automatically converted from that forum.)

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. --Kevan (talk) 28 March 2009

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? --Ben Henley (talk) 30 March 2009

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.

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. --Kevan (talk) 30 March 2009

This game looks fantastic - I hope that we can play it at a Sandpit soon... Hi Ben, I'm not sure we've met, great to read your game. I might reference it in an upcoming talk I'm giving in Liverpool - can you send me some biog details? --Alex Fleetwood (talk) 3 April 2009

I playtested this on Saturday.

It seemed to work well with 4 players (didn't have spectators doing predictions). I used a top hat and a glove (representing the invisible hand) to pick combinations. Making up the trades based on what players were saying seemed to work fine. It took about 40 minutes to play a game with around 6 rounds of trading, which seemed about long enough.

Holly was the fraudster and also won the game.

Displaying the bead trades was done by just putting the desired combination in a plastic box in the centre of the table - that worked fine.

Lessons learned: might be better to use square beads or Lego blocks instead of round ones, which tend to roll away easily when dropped.

Need to check that bead/block colours can be distinguished by colour blind people. --Ben Henley (talk) 6 April 2009

As the fraudster, I felt at quite an advantage in having complete information about which beads were good and which bad - this wasn't so clear at first, when I was worried that I'd get stuck with my worthless beads, but was definitely the case by around halfway through. I don't think this is a problem with the game at all - it felt quite thematically appropriate, certainly...

The need to get more beads, and the way that works, definitely helped to drive trading right to the end of the game, which I wasn't sure would happen. Should also help to get even more reticent players trading quite keenly. --Holly Gramazio (talk) 6 April 2009

I should probably have offered a really generous deal on the worthless beads in one of the last couple of rounds, just to stir things up.

Having spectators make predictions about who the fraudster is might make things harder for the Ponzi player - if they pick on cues that the other players don't... --Ben Henley (talk) 6 April 2009

I ran this at Sandpit #10 and it seemed to work quite well.

Have updated it to playable and edited the rules to reflect lessons learned. --benhenley (talk) 2009-04-24 11:48:51

I played this for the first at the Edinburgh Fringe Sandpit, and managed to win as an honest trader. I think I did a pretty good job of working out who the two fraudsters were - my initial two instincts got stronger and stronger as the game went on, and the whole deduction process was a lot of fun, particularly watching the behaviour of suspected fraudsters. Full marks to the one who boldly cashed in some chips to get a payout of his own colour.

I was a bit surprised that there wasn't more accusatory discussion of who the fraudsters were, but given that I was holding back my suspicions in the hope of keeping the ignorance spread out, it probably makes sense.

I felt a bit guilty about my win, though - my colour came up as the payout about three quarters of the way through the game, and I managed to cash in four sets of chips for 20 guaranteed points. I timed it a little carefully (cashing in after someone else had, so that I'd get my payout - and give away that blues were definitely solid - just before the bank ran out), which gave me a very slim extra advantage, but it felt a little too random to be truly satisfying. And the player next to me was a bit disappointed that her colour never came up as a payout. I'd be tempted to consider a rule limiting "insider trading" - you can only buy one set of your own colour when it comes up as a payout (which would also let fraudsters be sneakier; "oh, if only I could buy more of my own colour...") - but I've not really seen enough full games of this to know.

Great game, anyway - good to finally have a go at it. --Kevan (talk) 2009-08-27 23:15:08