Rules Drive Language
I had a thought while playing Reiner Knizia’s The Quest for El Dorado. TQFED is a deckbuilding game in a straightforward sense, themed around a Indiana Jones-esque race through a vaguely Central American jungle. It’s an enjoyable game and thematically mostly coherent, but there is an inflection point where the rules override a specific attempt of enforcing the language and theme.
In deckbuilding games, players acquire cards to shape their deck to meet certain challenges, acquire more cards, and reach their goal. I say acquire, because it is at this point that TQFED loses the battle, arriving at an unfortunate end. In the game, acquiring more cards is specifically called hiring a card, because while some cards are maps and jeeps, most are people: photographers, sailors, and native peoples (literally called natives, sometimes shamans, etc).
Despite the cartoonish theme, the designers probably want you to hire a native, and not buy a native. The problem is every player will always say buy and think of the action as buying. They are exchanging gold coins to place a card in their deck. The cards available to acquire/hire/buy are on a Market. The mode of explicit capital exchange is embedded in the game, and calling the process hiring will not reverse that.
Additionally, once a card is acquired, players have full control over it. The player doesn’t pay a stipend to the cards for their continued use, or need to care for them as people, and can freely use them for the rest of the game. My view is even if a lot of the acquiring process was changed, this permanent and total control of your cards will inevitably resort in players referring the action as buying. It’s not enough to say a set of actions means something when the collection of processes reinforces the underlying assumptions differently. This is how rules drive language