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SinbadHogBot: Instructions
SinbadHogBot is a competitive card game that is played in the chat room. Each round, a deck of cards is compiled and shuffled, and then each player is dealt nine cards. Each card has an item on it. The deck will contain nine cards with each distinct item on it, and the number of distinct items will be the same as the number of people playing the round. Thus, after the deal, all cards will be in play.
The object is to trade cards with other players until you hold all nine cards of a particular item. At that point, you say hog in the chat room, and the round ends. If more than one person says hog, only the first player to do so counts.
There are two ways to trade cards with another player:
- Make an open offer to trade with anyone. Do this by typing /b NNN, where NNN is a sequence of 1-4 card numbers. For example, /b 345 offers up cards 3, 4, and 5 to trade. (Other players won't be able to see which cards these are until they accept a trade.) As soon as any other player accepts your trade offer by offering an equal number of cards in return, the trade takes effect. The only way to withdraw an open trade offer is to change it by submitting a different trade offer or by accepting someone else's open trade offer.
- Accept someone else's open trade offer. All open trade
offers are reported in the chat room. To accept one, type
/b NNN PLAYER, where NNN is the list of
cards you wish to offer in return (you have to exchange the
same number of cards) and PLAYER is the username
of the player whose offer you are accepting. After accepting
an offer, the trade takes effect.
Note: If a player is marked [away], or has left the chat room, you may still trade with this player simply by issuing a /b NNN PLAYER command, as if that person had a trade offer on the table.
A critical rule about trades: you may only trade cards of the same type. So if you are giving away three cards of your own, all three of those have to be of the same item. Similarly, the three cards you receive in return will be of the same item.
The player who ends the round by saying hog with nine cards of the same item scores the number of points indicated next to the name of the item collected. For example, if the winning player has nine cards labelled thing [30], then he scores 30 points.
The remaining players only score ont points for each card in their largest collection of distinct items. For example, if a player has seven of one item and two of another, he scores 7 points.
The game ends when someone reaches 60 points. That person is declared the winner.
Note: Your performance in this game will be greatly improved if you can run with the "streaming" update method. See the "Options" page for more information.