| Yankee Trader is a "door" text-based game from the BBS era, which ran on MSDOS BBS's. It is similar to TradeWars 2002. Each user is the commander of a starship. You travel about the galaxy using modified MUD commands (instead of moving N,S,E,W, you move to an adjacent "sector" number). The object of the game, as it seems in all old door games, is to dominate the galaxy. This was accomplished by finding planets in sectors, buying commodities, and transporting them to other sectors' planets and selling them (hopefully at a hefty profit -- each sector's planet bought and sold each commodity for a different price, as their balance of commodities seemed to change with trade. If "Planet 1" had excess of commodity A (low price), but no commodity C (high price), Stock up on A, take it to "Planet 2" that lacks commodity A, but has excessive C. Sell the A, buy the C, return to "Planet 1" and repeat. This tedium was made easier with "macros" which could be programmed in the game itself, where you could watch 20 such trips scroll by with each keyboard entry. It seems the "galaxy" was relatively large, because even with 20+ players, you would only rarely find evidence of another player. As this was a one-player-at-a-time game, each player was limited to a certain number of "moves" per day, typically in the thousands -- taking a load of ore from one planet to another and so forth can blow a lot of "moves". After you were done with your "moves", you would be left sitting wherever you were -- various defenses could be set up just in case you were "found" by another player before the next day. Colonizing planets, protecting them by building massive fleets, battling with other users' planets and trade routes were also a major part of the game. [ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Yankee Trader ]
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