Review: Ponzi Scheme
Mar. 13th, 2017 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Last Saturday we played Ponzi Scheme for the first time. It's a game about taking on loans, buying crap industry shares, trading those shares, and taking on new loans to repay previous ones. Every loan gets you money right now, but you'll have to repay once every few turns later on, you can never get rid of those repayments. So the goal of the game is to not be the first to go bankrupt. A player going bankrupt triggers the endgame. That player, plus any other who can't pay their loans this turn, instantly lose. Of those players remaining, the numbers of industry shares they have determines the winner.
Generally I like the game, and the idea of postponing bankruptcy for as long as possible (while realistically not having any chance to avoid bankruptcy entirely). A downside to the game that we quickly realized was that in the center there's always 9 loans available to acquire. Every time someone takes one, a new one enters play, and those 9 loans have to be rearranged to be sorted a certain way. That's annoying, it happens to often and takes too much time.
Anyway, I guess that's a minor gripe for a game that I mostly enjoyed. It's slightly unrealistic though in that I won, even though it's a game about managing money. Then again, you could argue that you're managing money you don't have, so maybe it's not that far off in that respect after all ...
Generally I like the game, and the idea of postponing bankruptcy for as long as possible (while realistically not having any chance to avoid bankruptcy entirely). A downside to the game that we quickly realized was that in the center there's always 9 loans available to acquire. Every time someone takes one, a new one enters play, and those 9 loans have to be rearranged to be sorted a certain way. That's annoying, it happens to often and takes too much time.
Anyway, I guess that's a minor gripe for a game that I mostly enjoyed. It's slightly unrealistic though in that I won, even though it's a game about managing money. Then again, you could argue that you're managing money you don't have, so maybe it's not that far off in that respect after all ...