A few years ago, I had some ideas about a real-world trading game. In short, a combination of the game play of “Settlers of Catan”, the cute pseudo-medieval world of “The Settlers” (the computer game), which you can play in your every day live along, without having to sit in front of the computer for a long time. I then started some code, lost motivation and let it sit there for a while.

Recently, I re-developed interest in the idea and started from scratch, using Haskell and HAppS. To avoid losing interest again, I’m now putting the code online and set up the server. I invite everyone to play around with it, maybe have a look at the code, send me patches or comments. As you can see, the web user interface is plain ugly HTML and could need some love. Some CSS is definitely needed, some AJAX would be nice. Also, the resource tree is very small at the moment – there are a lot of things to work on, even if you don’t want to touch Haskell!

You can register at http://mumer.net/. You will be either given a forest (a source for wood) or a source of stone. You can reap your source, and trade on the “Free Market”, which is where you can always trade online, at bad prices. The idea is that you find real trade partners, to get better prices.

For now, trading without physical contact is possible. You can create so-called issue ids, which represent stips of paper. You can then load resources on them, and give the paper (i.e. the number) to other players, who can then redeem them. Eventually, it is planned that these pieces of paper are provided centrally and (sufficiently) unforgeable, so that it is clear who owns a resource.

You can also bid on certain stuff, such as a sawmil, which allows you to turn wood into boards. It will regularily be re-leased to the highest bidder.

You can get the code (in a darcs repository) from http://darcs.nomeata.de/mumer2 and also browse the code.

If you happen to be at the CCC right now and would like to talk about it, please do so!