Robber Banker
Private Wealth vs Public Prosperity
PLAYERS: 2-8
TIME: 45-55 minutes
AGES: 13+
It’s private wealth versus public prosperity in this clash between The People and The Banks.
Play for The People and try to protect your society’s wealth. Or be a banker and try to rob your society as often as you can by cleverly engineering a financial collapse.
The temptation to cheat on such agreements is omnipresent and constantly undoes alliances – there is no honour among thieves!
How Robber Banker Works
Players are either employed by one of The People’s agencies and play in collaboration with each other, or they are a bank working against The People and in competition with all other bankers.
The People must coordinate their investigation and regulation of banking if they are to have a chance of finding the toxic debt that threatens the wealth of the community and obliterate the banks that created it for their own profit.
On the other hand, banks must secretly pass on toxic debt to The People.
For the banks, it is a game of uncertainty that is complicated by the fact that each bank is different in terms of its size and its ability to create and hide toxic debt. For The People, by contrast, it is a game of coordination under sharp constraints of history. The stricter the laws that are passed to contain the banks the stronger is the political reaction that diminishes The People’s power in the next round.
For their part, the banks will sometimes be obliged to form uneasy alliances to reverse The People’s power.
But the temptation to cheat on such agreements is omnipresent and constantly undoes alliances between bankers – there is no honour among thieves!