You Can’t Spell “Market Fundamentalism” without “Fun”
“The Market Decides" game designer explains rules of new board game anyone can play
Frayek Miltman is the game designer behind “The Market Decides!”, a fun, friendly, family game anyone can play.
The game is simple and easy to follow.
All players start by taking a lucky dip from a hat for the figure they will use for the duration of the game.*
In the centre of the board, there is an iPad streaming live television.
All players start at “birth,” and move around the board. Depending on which figure you are, you collect different numbers of tokens. The winner is the player with the most tokens when the game ends, or if all the players are eliminated.
If you land on an “opportunity square,” you can choose to “privatise!”. You can choose what you privatise from a range of different vital infrastructures —eg. health, transport — but you need to have a significant number of tokens to do this. Each of the other players must then pay two tokens directly to you each time they move. If they run out of tokens, they are out of the game.
*Other game designers have criticised “The Market Decides!”, arguing that it is “rigged” because the figure you get by chance at the beginning of the game largely determines whether or not you’ll win. Frayek Miltman puts this down to jealousy of the game’s “alluring popularity,” since “people nonetheless still play it and enjoy it, whether or not they win, because of the live television in the middle of the board.”
