Hello, all! In a bout of inspiration from some ... (checks notes) macroeconomic books, I have been working on a design of an economic "board" game, which turns usual approaches upside down, is a bit of intensely competitive fun, where you can ruin yourself entirely with a wrong move, and is educational to boot. The main premise is that whereas most economic games tell you how much everything costs and you work out an optimal resource conversion path, sometimes in competition with other players, here you set the prices. And I don't mean in the sense of these awful trading games like Genoa, where players are swapping cubes for cubes in history's worst illustration of why money was invented, I mean actually set prices, in money, which others can then use to any extent they choose to. In fact, setting prices, and then taking advantage of prices set by others is just what the bulk of the game entails, also known as 'market making' in economics. But what you are really doing is something else entirely -- you are developing a space economy in a cluster of three asteroids, making investments, creating jobs, running factories. But radically, they way you are doing it is not by working out what's most profitable, but by telling each other what's profitable. What's more, money is unlimited, just as in reality -- banks are always willing to print more, provided you pay them sufficient interest, so if you really want to buy up the world's supply of food because you think it's underpriced -- you can. Better hope the gamble works out though.
The prototype, set up for 4 players is available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...=784204401, rules are included. You can make a copy and play it out over Discord in a pandemic-friendly fashion. Regolith should be blind-testing ready, so just by reading through the rules you should get a complete idea of how to play. But this is going out for blind-testing for the first time, so there will be gaps and errors. If you have a group of 3 interested in playtesting, just distribute the starting assets of the black player equally among others.
The prototype, set up for 4 players is available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...=784204401, rules are included. You can make a copy and play it out over Discord in a pandemic-friendly fashion. Regolith should be blind-testing ready, so just by reading through the rules you should get a complete idea of how to play. But this is going out for blind-testing for the first time, so there will be gaps and errors. If you have a group of 3 interested in playtesting, just distribute the starting assets of the black player equally among others.
