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There are many different kinds of oil and gas deals (transactions). This paper deals with working interest sales where the obligation to drill a well forms part of the transaction. These are referred to as farm-ins. There are at least two parties to a farm-in, investors and divestors, and there are a large number of corporate drivers that determine when a company chooses to play either role. Corporate expectations of the success of such a deal are generally unrealistic, especially as regards the time it will take to finalise the transaction, which at an average of about 18 months is longer than it normally takes to plan and drill an exploration well. The actual success of a farm-in/farm-out transaction will depend normally on a rather smaller number of external factors outside the control of either party, such as the price of crude, the cost of drilling rigs, the cost of commodities, the cost of seismic acquisition and other factors on a more local level such as currency exchange rate variations and government regulations. A range of outcomes is presented covering both onshore and offshore transactions, and comparing global trends with regional trends in the Far East. A cost effective database is used to analyse and develop models of the numbers of deals offered and executed, their geographic distribution, and trends in the terms of conventional deals (including levels of promote, price per point, normalised block value, costs per risked reserve and deal timing). For the purposes of this paper, North America (USA and Canada) is excluded from the worldwide analysis, as the deal parameters there vary significantly from almost all other countries under consideration.