by Britton Roney

My name is Britton Roney, and I am one of the designers of Wolf Street, first published in 2011 as Masters of Commerce, then renamed in the 2012 second edition to Panic on Wall Street!

Wolf Street is a real-time negotiation game for up to eleven players. At its finest, Wolf Street is a LOUD game, with players shouting across each other and wildly gesticulating in a chaotic frenzy of deal-making. It often draws parallels to the classic trading game Pit for its atmosphere, but seeks to straddle the gap between mindless party games and more meaningful strategic ones.

At the core of the game is an asymmetric system in which half the players are managers selling shares and half the players are investors buying shares, with one winner crowned from each group. Gameplay centers around two minutes of free-for-all negotiation between both groups for the managers' company tiles, which range from the high risk, high reward red to the stable but low return blue.

After each negotiation round, the value of each share shifts up or down based on a roll of the dice. Investors collect profits based on the results, then pay managers as agreed. Managers can add new company tiles in auctions against the other managers, but they owe fees based on the number of company tiles they control.

The game ends after five rounds with two winners: the manager and the investor with the most cash.

Design Story

The story of Wolf Street began all the way back in January 2010 in the Rocky Mountains of the USA, where it sprang into being in almost its final form in an hour's break between ski runs.

Having a new game design work — let alone be fun — after the first design session is, in all my experience, basically impossible. Game design is a process filled with dead ends, reboots, false starts, promising ideas failing spectacularly and patient playtesters...and yet Wolf Street really did work on almost the first try.

We were eating lunch between ski runs when my dad, Blake, suggested we make a game, specifically for a large group. I'm the oldest of eight siblings, all of whom love games and, along with the numerous uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws and everyone's friends that always seem to be around, we had a constant problem growing up of having too many players for the game we wanted to play, which meant leaving someone out or playing a lighter party game.

For inspiration, we drew on an experience we'd just been through with a real estate transaction, specifically involving a retail shopping center. As part of it, we'd been immersed in the oh-so-thrilling world of retail lease negotiation. Boring as it sounds, there is a surprising intensity to the whole lease negotiation process. Two parties, with imperfect information about each other, must work out an agreement lasting three, five, or even ten YEARS — or more! — and find out whether it was a good decision only long after.

We dumped the contents of several board games on the table — I remember CATAN, Monopoly, Ticket to Ride, and Dixit — and split the group into landlords and tenants. To solve the large group lag time problem, we quickly moved to real-time negotiation. To try to capture the delay inherent in leases, we generated a market board defining the risk of each type of property, allowing players to have a range of values as a basis for negotiation. We added a two-minute timer, and when we started up again there was a tangible energy to the negotiations that surprised us all!

The thorny problem of how to balance the two groups, which, depending on the market, might collect very different amounts of profit, was resolved elegantly when we hit on having a winner from each group. In this way, we ended up with essentially two games, interlocked together, as an excellent solution to the large group problem.


My first write-up of the rules (working title "Lords of Commerce") from 2 February 2010 contains all of these main elements that made it into the final game. There was still a lot of work to be done to fix the game flow and balance the market board, but a few hundred plays later by May we had a game we thought worth bringing to market.

Revisions and New Editions

Skipping an arduous up-and-down self-publishing process (Kickstarter was not well known yet), we had our first real success with the finished game at SPIEL '11, where we had a booth. It was such a fun experience to watch hundreds of strangers of every background and nationality play and (mostly) enjoy our game.

I have one particular memory of smiling from ear to ear as I monitored two games being played in drastically different ways. On the first table a seated group from Germany negotiated carefully and cautiously, pausing to calculate odds, while on the adjoining table players from Italy and France, on their feet and waving their arms wildly, frantically outbid each other for overpriced properties at such volume that half the exhibition hall had turned to watch.

At SPIEL '11 (Image: Jakub Niedźwiedź)
Importantly, at Essen we also played the game with Stefan Brunelle and others from Asmodee, who loved it and agreed to license the game with plans for an edition under a new imprint called Marabunta.

Asmodee's impressive team immediately recognized something I'd been unable to see, which was that this game should have a stock trading theme, not a real estate one. The updated title, artwork, and components all evoked the frenzy of a trading floor nicely and aligned well with the core gameplay. From a design perspective, we streamlined the game, eliminating a largely unused "exclusive" variant, integrating the "open/closed" variant as a standard rule, and simplifying the bankruptcy rules. Panic on Wall Street! hit the shelves worldwide in late 2012.



Fast forward again to April 2023, when I received a random email from a high school friend. Panic on Wall Street! had been out of print for several years, and though I'd fielded a few inquiries from fans of the game and publishers and considered bringing it back in print myself, there never seemed to be time to get to it.

My friend Mike introduced me by email to Bond Yuen, a colleague of his wife's uncle from Broadway Toys, a Hong Kong board game publisher. I'd lived and worked in mainland China and Taiwan for several years previously and was excited to connect to someone there, however random the connection seemed to be. I was impressed with Bond and his team's enthusiasm and vision for the game, and we agreed to a licensing deal within a few months.


The Wolf Street edition (狼爾街風雲 in Chinese) includes several tweaks to gameplay intended to further streamline and balance the game, many of which I'd been planning for years and some of which were put forward through the efforts of Broadway. (Shout out to Kitty Wan, who was incredible as the product lead.) The main changes include:

▪️ Re-balancing the market board and dice: In the initial development of the game, we ran up against the rare problem of a run of bad rolls across all four colors bankrupting all the players. We chose to address this by giving the green dice a positive imbalance to ensure more cash flow into the game. While this worked, over the years the imbalance became quite irritating, especially as it advantaged players who noticed it. Green is now evenly balanced again. The market board values have also been reworked with the help of a computer model to be better balanced in each color and be more dynamic with each roll.

▪️ No more player elimination: We originally thought eliminating players who bankrupted badly was necessary to keep the tension in the game, but this was a mistake as the game is always better with more players. The new bankruptcy rules balance risk for the managers of losing out on payment, while still giving bankrupt players a chance to recover and come back and win the game.

▪️ Improved manager play: We added a draft for starting companies for managers and changed the manager auction from an ascending price auction to a sealed bid auction to speed up that phase and enhance strategy. We also added a set-collection bonus for managers who collect company tiles of each color. This helps offset the issue of company tiles declining in value as the game progresses.

▪️ Improved 3-4 player variant: Wolf Street shines best with a large group, but this improved variant is actually very fun. (Try it if you get a chance!)

▪️ Introduced $1 bills to the components: I resisted this at first since it complicates the math, but playtesters reacted favorably to the added versatility in negotiations, so we stuck with it.

These changes, along with delightful new anthropomorphic animal art from the amazing Sonja Müller, make this the best version of the game yet. A big thanks to all the people at Broadway who have worked hard to bring this game back into print. I hope this edition brings you joy — and lots of shouting.

Britton Roney