In December, doho123 brought up the idea of creating a game based on a Calendar here's the original thread.
Based on that, I was trying to come up with a game that runs in real-time with real-world events. A game could run for weeks or months depending on what it's linked to.
What I have so far is the idea of setting up a stock-market type system but instead of companies, it would have some aspect of the event being tracked. (The event could be the MLB championships, so each team that has a shot would be a "company", or a reality TV show, or something just of interest to the players.)
Ideally, it's an elimination tournament of some sort so that each time a "company" is eliminated, their stock value is set to 0. Eventually there would only be one left and whoever has the most shares of that plus cash would be the winner.
The players would start with a certain amount of cash. To prevent a problem of initial allocation of shares, the players also start with shares of stock; maybe $100,000 and 100 shares of each company for example.
This also makes it possible to join in the game part way through; your only penalty is that the 100 shares of eliminated "companies" is worthless. If the shares started with the game system, it would be much harder to start partway through the game because all the shares would already be allocated.
The big hole in my design is how the exchange itself will work. I can allow players to place buy or sell orders and set a price. The best buy and sell prices for each stock would be visible so players could accept those offers, but what if nobody is trading? The real stock market has market makers who legally have to trade, but I'd have no good way of setting prices to make my own market maker.
Jason
I wasn't, but I am now (it's a very addictive site - I'm up $36k in the 12 hours since I signed up :) ).
That's basically what I wanted to do (I figured mine would have to have some sort of web-based program to keep score even though I wanted to consider it a board game). The only real difference in what I wanted is that my idea was much smaller scale. I would have just done the survivor warrants (for example) and then ended the game and declared a winner when survivor is over; then start again with a new theme.
Anyway, since HSX already does it so well, there's no point in my re-creating a smaller version. One thing I found interesting was that my main question here was how to handle trading and market price. Apparently HSX didn't handle it properly either; when you buy or sell shares they are just created or destroyed, and they use a "proprietary algorithm" to set the price instead of free market value.
Thanks for telling me about the site.
Jason