Ponzi Scheme
- Board's Eye View
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
The Universal Postal Union (UPU) was established in 1874 to coordinate worldwide postal services. In 1906, the UPU introduced the International Reply Coupon (IRC) that could be bought in one country at the local cost of an airmail stamp and sent to a recipient in another country where it could be exchanged for an airmail stamp there. In 1919, Charles Ponzi realised that money could potentially be made by buying IRCs in a country with low postage rates and selling them in a country where the postage rates were higher. The differences for any individual IRC were tiny but Ponzi envisaged buying and selling IRCs in massive numbers. He failed, however, to factor in the overheads involved which made any potential profit quite illusory. This didn't stop him tho' from marketing a get-rich-quick scheme that promised investors huge profits.
In practice, the IRC investment plan made no profit at all. Ponzi paid dividends to investors but this was entirely taken from the money handed to him by new investors. Stories in the press celebrating the seemingly huge returns meant that more and more investors came on board. Of course the amount that had to be paid out grew, and eventually, after about a year, the point was reached where Ponzi could no longer pay them and had to declare bankruptcy. His legacy is in the term 'Ponzi Scheme', which is still used today to describe fraudulent 'investments' where the managers are 'robbing Peter to pay Paul'.
That's the historical background to Jesse Li's economic game, which has become a modern classic since it first appeared in 2015, published by Homosapiens Lab. Tho' it was published in the US by Tasty Minstrel Games, it's not always been easy to find so we were especially pleased to see that Bright Eye Games have published a new edition to bring this great game to a wider audience.
In Ponzi Scheme, the 3–5 players begin with no money. On your turn you get to take a share in any one of the four companies in the game. A central funding board always has on it three rows of three cards, and when you take a share you draft a funding card from the row that corresponds to the number of shares you have in that company; so for the first share you acquire in each company, you must draft one of the three funding cards in the first row. If you already have three shares in a company, you can't add any more in this way because there is no fourth row on the funding board.
When you draft a funding card, you receive the amount of money shown on the card and you place that card at the indicated position on your clock board. The clocks all advance each round and when the clock reaches the position on which there's a card you must pay out the dividend shown. When (not if) a player is unable to meet their financial obligations, they are bankrupt and lose the game; the victor is determined by comparing the set collection points values of the shares held by the remaining players: a single share in a company will be worth 1 point, two shares 3 points, three shares 6 points, four share 10 points, etc.
What really stands out in this game, however, is the 'clandestine trading'. Each round you have the option of offering to buy a share from another player in any company in which you both hold at least one share. The game comes with a neat leatherette wallet and to make an offer you slip the amount you are offering into the wallet and pass it to the other player. They peek in the wallet and must either accept the offer (take the money and pass over the share) or reverse it: put the same amount in the wallet and hand it back. In that case, it's you who gets the cash and the other player gets to take your share. Tho' other players can see which shares change hands they don't know how much was paid. Players' cash is hidden behind screens so you can never be sure how close another player is to bankruptcy... Remember none of the players is operating a viable business model so the first priority in Ponzi Scheme is ensuring that another player goes bankrupt before you do.
There are a few small twists and turns in the game; in particular, some high-value/high-dividend funding cards show a 'bear market' icon, and in a round when the number of these cards on the funding board equals the number of players, the clocks advance twice; that can herald disaster if you were planning to raise a wad of cash on your next turn so you can meet the heavy outgoings that you thought were due two turns away...
The Bright Eye Games edition of Ponzi Scheme streamlines the earlier version by standardising the rules for luxury goods that were optional in the Homosapiens Lab edition. It's a way of turning cash into points: particularly useful if you've taken high-value funding cards and reckon another player will go bankrupt before your dividends fall due). The shares in this edition are simple straightforward cards and there's no chunky wooden holder for the paper money; tho' that was a nice feature it must've added substantially to the production cost of the game. As a result, the box for the Bright Eye Games edition is half the size of the original. The game still makes use of paper money. That's a pet hate for many gamers but in Ponzi Scheme its use with the wallet for 'clandestine trade' is integral to the game.