Wolf Street
- Board's Eye View
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Britton Roney's stock market game Panic on Wall Street! was originally published by Grouper Games and Marabunta in 2011 but it's been out of print for some time. The good news is that Broadway Toys are bringing it back. There have been some modifications but Wolf Street is essentially a reimplementation of Panic on Wall Street!, albeit with anthropomorphised animals - a nodding reference to bear and bull markets and to Martin Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street.
Like the earlier version, Wolf Street is a real-time negotiation game and it's about the closest you're likely to get to the seeming chaos of the stock market floor - with traders shouting their competing bids to buy and sell shares. Otherwise the nearest we've come to this is the deal-making in Sidereal Confluence (WizKids).
Wolf Street is played over five rounds. It's designed for 6-11 players, and it's probably at its best at the upper end of that range because players divide up so that half are investors and half are managers. The managers initially draft and in subsequent rounds bid for shares and, in the trading phase, they sell their shares to the highest bidder. It's this trading phase that's at the heart of the game. You play it with a strict 2-minute timer (not supplied: these days everyone has a timer on their phone) during which time investors are all simultaneously offering to buy shares. They'll agree a price with a manager, who'll put one of the investor's tokens on the share and mark the price on the share with a dry-erase pen but the deal isn't automatically binding on buyer or seller until they agree that the token is flipped to show the deal is closed. Until then, other investors can bid up the price and snag the deal. Managers obviously want to get as much as they can for their shares but they need to get at least $10 for a share to at least cover their upkeep costs.
Investors are buying shares because they hope they will be worth more than they pay for them. There are four types of share, ranging from low risk to high risk. The risk relates both to the range of share values and the fluctuation on that share's corresponding custom six-sided die. The lowest-risk share, for example, sells in a 10 to 50 range and the range on the die is -1 to +1. By contrast, the range for the highest-risk share is -20 to +80 and the die includes +7 and -7; so the share could potentially drop in value instantly from +80 to -20, or vice versa. The share price ranges in Wolf Street are wider than those in the earlier Panic on Wall Street! version of the game - so all the more reason to panic!
After five rounds the game will end up with two winners: the manager with the most money and the investor with the most money - so managers are only competing against the other managers, and investors are only competing against other investors.
We're not overly enthusiastic about the animal reskin but Wolf Street's other tweaks all offer small improvements on Panic on Wall Street. It's possible to go bankrupt in the game (ie: to lose all your money) but we were pleased to see that Wolf Street avoids player elimination. Investors who run out of money can take out a loan so they can keep playing, tho' the loan has to be repaid at the end of the game.