I'm taking another try at a football game. I want the fun to derive from the players haggling with each other over athletes.
Can you suggest an existing game mechanic that would be a good place to start? I'd like to avoid normal card drafting as it's not true trading.
Here's a basketball game that has a pretty straightforward auction mechanic for getting players:
https://boardgamegeek.com/video/742/basketboss/video-review-basketboss
It's a super underrated game. Probably would have gotten more buzz if it had been about trading silk in the Mediterranean. (Sadly)
But if you take some standard Euro mechanics and create a football game out of it, I'm totally on board. I think that would be awesome.
I definitely want to encourage trading. Which I guess isn't a part of Basketboss? The tough part is not having too much analysis of the options in front of you while still portraying interesting athletes.
You could do a similar style auction to simulate trading. You could place a player on the board that other players could bid for. They could offer you other players, money, etc. Then whoever wins the auction gets the player, and you get what they offered.
This is basically how it works in real life.
And you could have multi-team deals as well.
I like the idea of mixing up known and unknown quantities during the trade.
Imagine each thing in the game (coaches, players, draft picks, whatever) is a card that can be traded. Each player has a team of cards out in front of themselves showing statistics (last seasons team), maybe a draft pick (their player position), and lastly, a hand of "scouted" talent (randomly drawn cards) that no-one else can see, and a pile of money...
During the off-season, players are able to make deals for anything in their control. They will trade around, but ultimately, they want to get a hand of scouted talent that they will be able to play to improve their team.
The interesting twist, is that each scouted talent can have a bonus or a penalty. Some will come with a set of fans that will boost your income next turn, some will require a signing bonus that you have to pay, some may be injury prone, or they might be able to make "big plays" to win games.
In any case, the players shouldn't talk about that information, or show each other their hands, they should make verbal deals based on the scouted talents statistics.
Gabe: That sounds like a good way to limit the analysis.
Supafrieke: Hmmm, I've flirted with this idea before, and to be fair it probably deserves testing to see player's reactions. I'm concerned that the game will break down as players offer numbers to each other but don't trust each other...maybe the 'interesting twist' part is randomized results from the Injury deck, Fans deck, and Big plays deck so that you aren't sure if the player will get hurt, or make that big play?
Certainly, you could push the unknowns to a separate draw deck but you remove some of the excitement of negotiating. You could also remove the restrictions on sharing information and leave it up to the table.
The more information is known and the more you can "calculate" the value of a trade, the more players will spend time doing so...
Or you might take direction from "Mare Nostrum" and have the trade phase very structured where everyone offers trades and they are taken in turns. E.g. each player selects some set of resources to trade, and then everyone reveals and places their pile in the middle. Then in some kind of turn order, players take turns selecting the pile of resources they prefer.
You might also do something like a you-split-I-pick mechanism where piles of footballers are created by discarding into stacks and players are "out" as they take a stack similar to "Zooloretto". There is a push-your-luck aspect, but much less direct player interaction.
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This is great. Thank you!