Key Takeaways
- Planet Money collaborated with Exploding Kittens to develop an economics-themed board game, aiming for both fun and educational content.
- The game's core mechanic derived from Nobel laureate George Akerloff's 'Market for Lemons' concept, requiring significant iterative development.
- Game design involved balancing economic principles with engaging gameplay, optimizing for a 20-minute play duration and cost-effective all-paper manufacturing.
- Initial expert playtesting yielded positive feedback, with a game consultant noting a novel and dynamic mechanic.
- A prototype of the Planet Money game is now available for public download and playtesting, with an AMA event scheduled for November 1st.
Deep Dive
- Planet Money initiated a project to create a board game, noting that tabletop games constitute the largest category on Kickstarter.
- The team pitched 17 economic game ideas to Exploding Kittens game designer Elan Lee, seeking to combine fun gameplay with economic concepts.
- Concepts included 'elves planning for retirement,' 'apprentice wizards running a bank,' a compound interest game inspired by Risk, 'Moral Hazard,' and 'Keeping Up with the Joneses.'
- Exploding Kittens co-founder Elan Lee focused on the 'Market for Lemons' concept from the 17 initial ideas due to its strong gameplay potential.
- This concept, developed by Nobel laureate George Akerloff, describes market failure caused by asymmetric information, such as in used car, health insurance, or hiring markets.
- Exploding Kittens found the 'Market for Lemons' concept compelling for its 'strong branding' and inherent gameplay pattern involving deals with unequal information.
- A breakthrough occurred as the Exploding Kittens team improvised with standard playing cards, assigning red cards as 'bad' and black cards as 'good' to represent the core mechanic.
- The card game mechanic involves a seller drawing two cards, proposing a deal to a buyer who decides to accept or reverse it, aiming to explore social manipulation and bluffing.
- Initial playtests, including one where a seller split two bad cards and the buyer accepted, demonstrated surprising strategic depth and engagement across multiple rounds.
- Exploding Kittens' lead designer Elan described the mechanic as a breakthrough, noting how intellectual curiosity quickly escalated into animated player reactions.
- The game entered extensive prototyping, with Exploding Kittens sending handmade cards and instructions; the core objective is for players to collect good cards and avoid bad ones.
- Exploding Kittens advised Planet Money on manufacturing realities, including an optimal game length of approximately 20 minutes for maximum entertainment.
- To keep manufacturing costs low and enable a $20-$25 retail price point for stores like Target and Walmart, an all-paper game design was recommended over plastic coins.
- After numerous prototypes, the Planet Money team concluded that a direct simulation of a 'market for lemons' might cause the game to stall.
- A key design change involved the seller revealing one card from the deal, providing the buyer with partial information to better reflect real-world asymmetric information dynamics.
- The Planet Money team expressed high enjoyment during playtesting, with one producer describing the rough draft as 'a lot of fun' and 'great'.
- A prototype of the Planet Money game was brought to Jamie Wolansky, a game consultant who helped 'Settlers of Catan' enter Target stores, to assess its mass retail potential.
- During a hotel lobby playtest involving the Planet Money team and Exploding Kittens crew, Jamie initially questioned the information asymmetry but found the game's strategy 'dynamic' after a round.
- Jamie Wolansky, who won the playtest, expressed excitement about the game's novel mechanic, stating that there is 'no other game like it.'