Pawn Stars: The Game turns the History Channel show into a retail adventure.

Facebook games like FarmVille are all about acquiring an impressive collection of virtual items, but in History Channel’s Pawn Stars: The Game, the goal is clearing out your hockshop’s inventory of used goods.

In the game, customers stream steadily into your store, looking to sell off their valuable (and not at all valuable) treasures of days gone by. As in the popular television show Pawn Stars, you’ll haggle with customers to buy their items at good prices, so you’ll turn a profit later.

As a big fan of the show (I even made a pilgrimage to the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop when I was in Las Vegas last year), I find Pawn Stars to be an addictive little game. Trying to figure out which items to buy, memorizing how much I can expect to get for each one — it doesn’t quite replicate my real-life hobby of haggling over collectible videogames, but it captures a bit of it.

The game’s lead designer, Andy Marsh of San Francisco’s Antmesh Games, says there’s a lot of complex math going on behind the scenes every time you try to bargain over an autographed Lou Gehrig jersey. He offers five tips for gaming the system and building your own virtual pile of cash off imaginary characters’ hard luck:

1. Know your customers. When Pawn Stars: The Game launched, the customers were only different in a visual sense. In the latest update, some customer types are easier to haggle with, Marsh says. “The old man is more hard-nosed in his negotiating sense,” he says, so don’t try to push the crotchety old coot too low. Meanwhile, the hippie lady will be much more receptive to your lowball offers.

Random tweaks to each character’s personalities mean no two deals will go down identically. “Each instance of a customer going into your store has a different set of six variables based on the template for that character,” says Marsh. “All old men are not created the same.”

2. Know your history. “Think about things realistically,” says Marsh. “These are the actual values of the items in real life.” Many of the items were featured on the show, from a United States flag carried aboard Apollo 16 to a wooden, pull-string duck toy. Get the retail prices down and you’ll recognize good deals.

3. Haggle with finesse. The current haggling mechanic, which like everything in a Facebook game is subject to change at any moment, is “sort-of based on a fighting game,” Marsh says. Customers have a “patience bar,” and every time you make an offer they lose some patience. They storm out of your store when they’re fed up. If you make too low an offer, they might shut down, and you’ll have no way to get the item (unless you give them Candy, which costs Facebook Credits, which cost real-life dollars that you could be spending on actual collectibles).

“If you’re savvy, you can try to work them down over time,” Marsh says. Make offers that are low enough to get them to come down on their price, but not so low that they end negotiations.

That said, “Never be afraid to bid really low in order to gauge where people are willing to go,” says the game’s producer, Aaron Krasnov. If a customer has a lot of patience, you might hazard an offer of $0 to get them to drop their asking price by a lot.

4. Don’t renovate your shop just yet. You can spend Facebook Credits on shelves to sell more items, but you might want to hold off. Marsh says an update to the game is coming that will allow for all kinds of different shelves that have different effects. Use Costco-style metal shelving and you’ll be able to hold more items for sale. Use fancier glass shelves and you’ll gain more Prestige for each item, but not be able to stock as many.

5. Know when to walk away. “Don’t be afraid to lose the item,” Marsh says. “If the random variables are all against you, you should say no. If you play like [you] have to buy everything, that won’t work out for you.”