math help for stock market game for kids - "Greedy Monkeys"

An idea that can be interesting (maybe):

Simultaneous play: you can bid secretly or not secretly for some fruit, putting a card faced up or faced down (depending on what you like more for your game) over/close some card on the table to "buy" it.

Obviously this automatically balance the "price" of the fruits, i.e., you have a real market simulator here.

You can bid with some cards that simulate money (some numbered cards, maybe taken randomly or letting the same amount for every player at the start of the game) and/or bid directly with your own fruits, but this fruit is discarded of the game one time is used.

The value of each fruit will depend on the fruits over the table: no one fruit of the kind of fruit is played as a bid means the maximum value, you can assign to this card the 0-value (what means the maximum). To solve bids the minimum number then wins. If there is a draw you can use a dice, declare null this bid, etc...

In this sense you can bid with multiple cards, mixing money and fruits. It depends on the mechanic you are interested. Indeed you can put in the game some rules cards that change these basic rules over the turns, etc... So many ideas here.

One problem in this framework: you need some extra cards/tokens if you really want that the game will be simultaneous, i.e., that nobody knows over what card you are bidding. If not then the game is not simultaneous, it will be just unordered (it is not the same) i.e. people play in any order every turn.

Over the state of your game: there is no problem on manipulate market, this is very real! An moreover: everyone have the opportunity to manipulate if you rotate turns.

One very important point that you dont said (but implicitly I think how they can be, maybe) is how to win, how the point rules works.

Some idea: getting more different amounts of fruits must be better that getting the same kind of fruits, but quantity matters too. Then you can define points from some kind of groups of cards, as in poker, where 3 different cards represent more points that 3 identical cards, but 3 identical cards represent more points than 2 different cards, etc...

You said in the OP that the last player has an advantage because they can manipulate market. I assume that this manipulation you are talking about is at the end of the last round, since he knows the game is going to end and can try to push up prices of fruit that he has lots of.

If this is what is happening, one way to avoid it is to change the ending condition. Games which end at the end of "round X" typically suffer from this problem, because the last player knows that nobody else can interfere or respond after their turn.

For example, you could say the winning condition is to get 5 of the same type of fruit in your hand. Now you don't know for sure who is winning, but by observing what other people buy you could get an idea of what they are collecting. Also, as you accumulate more of the same type the price will go up making it harder to get more (while simultaneously incentivizing others to sell them).

A different kind of ending condition could be to "eat" fruit (discard face up in front of you). After all, why would the monkeys be collecting fruit if not to eat it? Maybe your goal is to eat 2 of each fruit, but you can only eat 1 per turn. So you have to tradeoff between collecting more fruit vs eating them.

Another fairly common ending condition is to trigger a "final round" when some condition happens. E.g. a player can declare "food fight" when they have at least 3 of the same fruit in their hand. Each other player gets one more turn, and then all hands are revealed and the points tallied. So a player is only going to call the end of the game if they think they can win. (Note: If designed badly this type of ending can result in a "hostage situation", where nobody is willing to call the end of the game because it will guarantee that they don't win. Some published games have this problem.)

Regards,
kos