Trade You a Tribonium for Two Unethical Items

As part of the Mooncurser's Handbook, a crazy 30 hour road rally that I wrote about yesterday, we had to take part in a "trading game." This was something new and drastically different from anything that we had experienced in The Game before.

The "trading game" involved collecting items at each of the various clue locations we visited. We were seeded with an initial set of items. Various pieces of information--about how much the items were worth (e.g. vegetables were worth 2 points), special bonuses that we would get if we had certain combinations of items (e.g. if you had four identical items you'd get a bonus of 25 points), and trading restrictions (e.g. if you turned in any more than 12 items at the final location, Game Control would randomly throw items out until you had 12) would be revealed to us as we finished solving each puzzle as well.

The goal of the "trading game" was to maximize the number of points you thought you could get relative to all of the other teams. Since your ranking in the "trading game" amounted to 37.5% of your final score in the Mooncruiser's Handbook Game, all of the teams really wanted to do well in the trading aspect of The Game.

There were many complex bonuses and trading rules that we learned about over time. For example, if you had four "Tribonum" items, which were classified as "rare" and "dangerous", you could get a bonus of 40 points. Or if you were the team that had the most amount of items classified as "drugs", you would get a point bonus that was equal to the square of the number of item that were classified as "unethical." (So if you had 10 "unethical" items, you would get an extra 100 point bonus since 10-squared is 100).

Upon learning how the trading game worked, our team quickly formed an alliance with several other teams in The Game. Our plan: have one central third-party trading coordinator handle the distribution of items. We would reveal all rules to the trading coordinator and all the items that our team had. Since he had a global view of all the items that every team in the alliance had and understood all the bonuses and rules, he could distribute the items so that we would optimize the score for ALL the teams involved.

Furthermore, the coordinator would be able to figure out what items we wanted to trade with other teams so that we could optimize our collective set of items even further. Each of our individual teams had a designated broker that was instructed to try to obtain certain items from other teams NOT in the alliance, and the coordinator provided us a list of items that we could part with in order to trade.

In theory, this would have worked very well if you had enough teams in the alliance and every team cooperated with the rules we had initially laid out.

In practice, this didn't quite work out the way we wanted it to. We still got a better ranking and item distribution by being part of the alliance than not, but several teams dropped out before we handed in our items.

This screwed up what we calculated as the optimal distribution sending the remaining teams into a frenzy to try to fend for themselves right before the trading deadline). We still did well in the rankings, and much better than the teams that dropped out (oh what poetic justice), but not as optimally as we had hoped for if all the teams stayed in the alliance.

We also found it difficult for each team's brokers to conduct trades with non-alliance teams during the Game. First, some brokers weren't really motivated to trade (they were too busy solving puzzles). Second, we wound up continuously changing our optimization strategy and became too greedy with our trades--we tried to trade for certain items at the last minute and wound up not getting them. Our assumption that we could get these items really messed up our optimal distribution; this in turn screwed over a couple of teams.

That said, we found the trading game to be fun and interesting. It added much more intrigue to The Game and made the experience rather interesting. The trading game did make our experience in the Mooncruser's Handbook much more stressful (especially since we had a small team and having to broker cards and conduct trades often distracted us from puzzle solving). Nonetheless, it was a grand experiment and we enjoyed having the opportunity to participate in it.