Here's a very rough outline of an idea I had for a board game which allows people to gently educate themselves and their families and friends about various practical aspects of using cryptocurrencies.
Scenario
Instead of an Amazon gift certificate, this year your wealthy uncle has decided to send you and each of your siblings a CryptoHamper TM Pending ;) for Christmas. The aim of the game is to ride the ups and downs of the crypto markets and come out ahead.
So to start with your game tokens which represent your crypto holdings are all placed in a single exchange entity.
The Game Board
A network diagram which has distinct areas representing the following elements:
- Exchanges (Bittrex, Blocktrades, Coinbase, etc. - to be determined)
- Digital Asset Storage Provider (Electrum, Exodus, Nano Ledger, etc. - to be determined)
- Fiat Currency Banks (to be determined)
The network topology will probably need to be quite fully connected, although Digital Asset Storage Providers will not connect directly to the banks. Below is a rough illustration, except that the entities would be bigger and the connections smaller.
Wallet
A plastic/metal holder which contains your 'tokens' to differentiate them from those belonging to other players who are on the same game element (exchange/digital asset storage provider/bank). Each player may have several wallets. These could be similar to the trivial pursuit 'pie holders', or the 'Game of Life' person holders. The owner of each wallet might be determined by the colour of the holder.
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Tokens
Plastic/metal tokens represent n popular Cryptocurrencies (to be chosen). These have different physical characteristics (color, shape or both).
The Price Feed
An element (perhaps digital) which updates the prices of all assets every turn. This could be implemented most easily as a website that a player uses on their tablet device or phone. But could also be governed by rolling dice.
Gameplay
Player takes turns to draw an fortune card, which affects either just them, or other all players. Examples might be:
- Bittrex is temporarily down (cannot move assets in or out of exchange)
- Electrum is hacked (the price falls, and you lose 1 token for every 4 you own)
- Steem is listed on a new Korean exchange (the price rises, and you gain 1 token for every 2 you own)
- Ethereum Forks (not sure how, or whether to try to model this)
- US bank suspects large scale money laundering (USD balances are frozen and cannot be moved for the remainder of the game)
- Regulators declare that Bitcoin Cash is a security (the price falls, and you lose 1 token for every 4 you own)
- Bitfinex is hacked and goes out of business (all funds held there are now gone, and this exchange can no longer be used)
- Your computer has been compromised (any tokens held in your PC based digital asset storage devices are now gone)
- Amazon announces SBD will be accepted for purchase (the Steem price rises, you gain 1 token for every 1 held)
Because of how price changes effect discrete tokens, there might need to be some way of dealing with this. Perhaps players might also need to have a stack of tokens off the game board which act as a buffer. When they have more than n of each, they can add them to the board, but I'm quite unsure about this aspect
After the event card has been used, the player can then move up to n tokens one step in any direction on the board.
I'm aware the metaphors I have used are not properly consistent. For example, how do the price feeds fit with the idea that some fortune cards increase the supply of tokens when representing a price increase? These issues need to be ironed out. Also, the design of the game requires that we draw a distinction between Digital Asset Storage Providers and Wallets, whereas in the real world the word wallet is often used interchangeably to mean both a person's wallet, and the wallet provider.
There are a lot of other areas that are not explored, such as transaction fees, which don't seem easy to model with tokens like this, and lots of terminology and ideas that would improve the game. The criteria which ends the game would also need to be developed.
Anyway, hopefully that embryonic idea might inspire further thoughts/discussion along these lines sometime :)