The Money
The money looks pretty enough though I do find it funny that they have gone to the trouble of placing a copyrighting their play money. The phrase “Hot Stocks” appears just below the the denomination value in middle of the note. These words don't appear anywhere else in the game. 20 of 1's, 5's and 50's, 40 of 10's and 20's. The total value of the money included in the game is 2.32 million dollars. I've only payed the game with 2 people but it seems entirely possible that with 6 players, you could run out of printed money before that game ends.
Share Price and Transaction Sheets
There are two pads of tear off sheets that can be used to record the current share price of each share and the transaction records for each player.
Click
on the form for a closer look. This form is used by the banker to
record the current value of the each share throughout the game.
Click
for a closer look. This form is used by each player to record
their current stock holdings.
Each pad has 25 copies. They are just slightly smaller than A4 size which makes them very convenient to photocopy if you use them all up. There isn't any real reason why you cant play the game with some blank paper if you use up all the forms anyway.
Cards
There are three kinds of cards in the game. The cards are drawn from the appropriate decks when you land on the right type pf marked square.
Dream & Reality Cards - The ups and downs of life
There are 20 of these cards. 9 bad and 11 good. The cards are heavily weighted towards the good with at least 3 cards giving a cash bonus of $100,000. Of the bad cards, the worst is a fee of $50,000 for Luxury kitchen. The rest of the bad are much less than that. It seems there are many more ups than downs. Just like real life.
Day Trader Cards
The day trader cards are basically a bet. You place an amount over $1000 down an then draw a card.
There are 16 cards. 7 of them mean you lose your bet. 3 double your money, 3 triple your money and 3 quadruple your money.
This makes it a pretty good bet as you should average a 70% return for every bet you make. I make the bet every time with half the cash I have on hand.
Market Cards
Market cards are the ones that make the share price change.
Each stock has 11 cards in the deck except Bank of America, Nike and Disney which has 10 and Yahoo which has 12.
The stocks can be divided into 3 categories. The blue chips like Disney, Nike and Bank of America which have a start value of $5000. Then there are the middle risk companies, Apple, AOL, Amazon, Johnson and Johnson, Microsoft and Home Depot. These have a start price of $10,000 Finally we have Yahoo that has a start value of $20,000.
In the blue chips, there are 7 "up" cards and 3 down. The ups are $5000 and the downs are $2000.
Int the middle companies there 7 ups and 4 downs. the ups are $10000 and downs are $5000.
Yahoo has 7 ups and 5 downs. the ups are $20000 and the downs are $10 000.
The cards have plenty of humor value in them as well as educational value on how the stock market works. Like:
"Analysts expected 39 Cents, earnings come in at 38 cents. Home depot Drops $5,000"
"Yahoo reports earnings. Company loses 13 cents a share. Analysts expected 14 cents. Yahoo shares soar $20,000"
and the totally nonsensical "Amazon reports earnings. Company loses 5 million dollars this quarter. Analysts expect 4 million. Shares go up $10,000."
There are plenty of terms and ideas to explain to kids from the cards like buying on the dip, what is a resistance level , taking a profit, a stock split, a whisper number.