I participated in this year’s Buckeye Game Fest No-Ship Math Trade and the results are in! For those of you that are unfamiliar with Math Trades, users submit to a large list, the games they’re willing to trade away. After submissions are closed, all users use a software tool to assign games they’ve put in the trade as candidates for trading for other games on the list. If you have a game in the list and you can’t find another game on the list you’re willing to trade for it, then you just get your game back risk free. After everyone assigns the games their willing to trade for other games, a trade maximizer tool is used to determine the largest number of N-way trades possible. Since they’re N-way trades, you may trade a game to another user but receive the game you wanted for it from a different user. This year some 32 users put 338 games on the list!
No-ship Math Trades occur usually at board game conventions where participants are already gathering and there’s no shipping involved. This year I entered 14 games into the trade and came away trading 5.
For Mission: Red Planet, I received Alea Iacta Est
For Key Harvest, I received Tongiaki
For Andromeda, I received a 1968 3M bookshelf version of Acquire and a sweetner of Fedual
For Antike, I received Steam
For Witch’s Brew, I received King of the Elves
All in all I’m happy with the trades and thank zefquaavius a.k.a. Nathan Morse for going through the trouble of hosting it again this year. And sorry, Nathan, that you missed out of my copy of Witch’s Brew.