After a year of scandal spanning everything from foreign exchange rate-rigging to fat-fingered trades and money laundering, you would think bankers might be looking to unwind over a gentle game of Scrabble or Cluedo this Christmas.
But if runaway sales of a board game based on a banking crisis are anything to go by London’s financial elite like to take their work home with them.
Market Meltdown, which has echoes of the 2008 crisis that led to the worst UK recession since the 1930s, has become one of the bestselling games sold by Peter Jones, the department store which functions as a local corner shop for bankers and hedge fund managers living in Kensington and Chelsea, the London borough where the average house price has now reached more than £2m.
The game’s maker, Clarendon Games, said sales had more than doubled this year. And Will Sorrell, one of the game’s creators, said that there had been particular interest from finance professionals.
“We wanted to create a financial trading game that forced players to behave in a way that led to the financial crisis,” he said of the game, which has wannabee ruthless traders moving around the board by private jet.
The premise is reminiscent of Monopoly, the 80-year-old classic in which players try to amass a fortune via property speculation. But in Market Meltdown players start rich and have to try to stay solvent in the face of defaults, spiralling debts and bonus caps.
“I assume the people that are making big investments make their decisions based on rational reasons, but they tell me that markets aren’t always rational,” explained Sorrell, whose father was a stockbroker in the “boom and bust” 1980s.
Launched in 2012 the game has similarities with the recent travails of real-life investment banks, as players can be fined for market manipulation or wiped out when the price of oil plummets.
Each circuit of the board brings an interest rate hike (offering a taste of Russia’s current turmoil), while playing the quantitative easing card triggers a massive cash injection – a scenario the European Central Bank might act out for real next year.
In contrast to real life - as the French rogue trader Jerome Kerviel found to his cost - the rules permit players to “go rogue” by borrowing up to a billion pounds to cover losses should their trades go awry.
“By encouraging players to borrow liberally and take massive risks we wanted not only to provide lots of fun but also help people avoid making the same mistakes in the future,” added Sorrell, perhaps a little optimistically.
Even if, as yet, there is little evidence players are heeding Market Meltdown’s life lessons, Peter Jones has been restocking more than any other store over the last month, according to Clarendon.
John Lewis, which owns Peter Jones, confirmed the game was one of the branch’s top sellers. Its said the success has prompted the store group, which also owns Waitrose, to increase stocks of the game at its Canary Wharf branch – the heart of the capital’s banking district.
Robert Hendrickson, marketing manager at the store, said: “The majority of our customers are bankers and so there tends to be a high demand for what they want – our wine and steak-and-oyster bars both do very well.”
