Money Maker

The credit trading and ascending debt board is cool.

The most interesting decision in the game is the auction price and the game demands you rush rush rush through every auction or it would take a miserable amount of time.

But then nothing you do actually matters because the game is both player balanced during negotiations, and there's swingy as fuck dice and a deck of insane card powers, making the whole thing dumb as hell.

You could replace the entire bank run dice mechanic with removing goods equal to player count and flipping a coin if the crash track increases and the game would be better.

The fundamental challenge of game design is how do you make a game that rewards correct play without making it so calculable to encourage AP, and 99% of games fail at this challenge, and so does this one.

The bank run track does not scale between player counts. You likely have twice as many turns between bankruns in three player as you do as five. There's a chance this is intentional, but I expect it is not.

The player to the right of you doing well is extremely bad for your sale price. You can price protect that in the auctions but it all goes up in smoke in the negotiations.

This game could smoke QE if it got rid of the dice and action deck and had a futures market for the incoming company.

A really great and fun game to play with friends! I love the idea of building buildings that work together and then pushing the market to screw with your friends and make them lose money ;)

Best speculation game ever, but you need to play without the extremely powefull "chance card"!

A game explaining the reality of a 17th century banker in Amsterdam. Every economist should play this game (I have a MA myself), and so should every person in today's society as the banks are the same, although protected by tax money, so they can't go all bankrupt (as in 2008), like they can in this game. Credit economics is like playing Black Jack: you want to be 21, but 22 makes you lose. So, it's a "push your luck" type of game.

Of course there are plenty of "expansions" that can be made to make the game more interesting. But such expansions would distract from the core of the game, which is to understand how to make real money by first creating credit out of nothing.

Even after 200 games played (and counting) I still see players developing new strategies never seen before. But hey, I am the designer, so I guess that I am a bit biased :)

See my full review in the Forum