Hey everyone. I'm creating an online game (which I won't advertise here), and I'm trying to think of some good gameplay mechanics for it.

It's a persistent game: just like an MMORPG, there's only one game and the game never ends.

I'm not expecting it to become popular; if 5 people end up being active players, I'll consider that a small success.

I want the gameplay to be based on trading and economics.

Right now the gameplay is dead simple... too simple.

You can use iron to build iron mining machines. You can also use iron to build gold mining machines. You can use gold to trade with other players.

It's boring, of course, but I haven't been able to come up with any ideas for stuff to add to make it more interesting.

@TerranSwett Not sure if you're aware that this is a board and card games chat room. Do you want your game to be similar to or based on existing board and card games?

What do you want the experience of playing the game to be like?

@murgatroid99 Yeah, I figured board and card games may be a good place to take inspiration from, since those are likely to be relatively easy for me to implement in code.

What I'm really interested in having is a stock market, but you can't have a stock market without an economy, so I need to think of some kind of interesting game mechanics for that.