inconsequential ruminations

Last night, four of us played Stockmarket, a 1987 game I picked up from a BoardGameGeek math trade. I was expecting something like Buy Low Sell High or Executive Decision, games about supply and demand, but instead Stockmarket is more about double guessing.

The rules are simple. Players can invest in six different companies. Every round each player gets 10 cards with stock price movements, for instance “Legal & General -50p” or “Nat West +£2” and money to invest in shares. In each round there are three phases where players can either buy or sell one company’s shares. At the end of the round all cards from all players are pooled and added together, so that each company’s share price fluctuates. These prices fluctuations mean that player’s stock becomes more or less valuable. When buying stock, players only know the price changes in their hand of cards and the stocks that other players are investing in, so they have to follow market trends, just like in real life. There are a few other rules, like cards allowing you to stop a price movement in a single stock, rights issues, currency fluctuations and directorships, but the game is won and lost with the stock movement cards.

The psychology of the stockmarket’s herd mentality is interesting, it’s fun to be a 1980’s yuppie, but there is a lot of slow, fiddly arithmetic, the decisions are fairly obvious and there is a lot of luck. Executive Decision and Buy Low Sell High are slightly better options.

5/10

We finished with a 3-player whirl through San Juan. I still think it is a classic.