by W. Eric Martin

In Reiner Knizia's card game Money!, you get to play the role of a money-sorting robot that starts with a random assortment of currencies, silver, and gold and tries to shift things around the table until you have as few sets as possible. Beep boop!

Your robotic fantasy will be thwarted by the other money-sorting robots at the table as they have their own ideas of how they want to sort things. They might take what seemed optimal for you to collect, or they'll hold on to a critical bit of currency that would make your logic circuits cascade a splendid light shower in satisfaction. After all, Asimov's Laws don't prevent them from injuring you to their non-existent hearts' desire.

The challenge, however, comes in assessing what to collect, what others are collecting, what they're giving away in bids to make those collections, what hasn't yet been seen from the supply, and how desperate someone is to get item X. No correct answer can be assessed given all these variables and known unknowns, so you'll have to put aside the calculations at some point and take a chance on doing something stupid that might turn out to be the best idea ever — or just something stupid.

You'll only know once it's happened, then you can carry that knowledge into your next money-sorting event, at which time you'll discover that you still don't know what to do to optimize your holdings. Boo-ooo-ooo-oop.

Money! can be played by dictators as well, of course, and to do that you take two more sets of currency cards than the number of players — that is, 5-7 sets — shuffle them with all the silver and gold cards, then deal each player six cards. Each currency has nine cards comprised of values 20(x3), 30(x3), 40, 50, and 60, and if you collect at least 200 out of the total 300 in a currency, then the currency holds its value and is worth that many points. In effect, by fiat you have nationalized this currency to become of value in the country you rule, and therefore because you say it has value, it does.

Anyone who has less than 200 of a currency is on the outs with a monetary unit that they don't fully control, so that currency is worth face value minus 100, with a minimum value of 0. If you don't control it all, then it's rarely worth it to control even a part...except when you collect all of the 20s or 30s in a currency. If you do that, then a currency collector will take a picture of you to honor your ability to monopolize a denomination — currency collectors are strange like that — and that picture is worth 100 points.

Silver, on the other hand, is worth 10 "money" and gold 20 "money". You rarely care about these measly amounts, but unlike currencies, precious metals will always* hold their values at a 1:1 money-to-point ratio, so they're worth something at game's end no matter what.

(Note: This is not financial advice, but precious metals will not always hold their values. Given enough time, everything is worthless thanks to the awesome power of entropy.)

Should you collect three silver or three gold, those currency collectors will snap a pic of that as well: 100 points for you, unexplained internal satisfaction for them.

Non-dictatorial humans can also play Money!, and they'll be more welcome at your table since they're unlikely to have armed thugs on hand to enforce their dictates. Heck, they probably won't dictate at all since few people do that on the daily.

At the start of the game, you're staring at a motley assortment of money in hand, with perhaps only a single silver or gold being of innate* value — but the entirety of your hand is still worth something: potential. Yes, the individual currencies are worthless right now, but everyone at the table is filled with hope and will grant you potential value based on the numbers you hold.

What do you do with this potential value? Ideally transform it into actual value, just as potential energy can (in the right circumstances) live up to its promise and become actual energy.

The means to do this comes from an injection of capital by an abstract force that people know only as...The Market. Four cards are revealed from The Market in two lots, then everyone decides what they want to bid for one of those lots...or for something else, namely another player's as-yet-unrevealed bid.

The Market at work
The value of your bid is the sum of your cards' potential, and whoever reveals the largest bid can swap their bid for one of The Market lots or another player's bid...or they can return their bid to hand, which seems like they wasted everyone's time while revealing the contents of their hand, but this choice can be of use.

Let's look at a complete round of play for an example:


After seeing the lots, everyone has revealed their bids, with the player bidding 60 choosing first, taking the lot on the left and leaving their bid in its place.


In one sense that player spent 60 "money" to get 120 "money", so they doubled their holdings — but more importantly they grabbed two panda bills, which means they probably have one or more panda bills in hand already. Maybe not, though — maybe they just wanted to double their money to have increased bidding power in future rounds. Time will tell.


This player also doubled their money from 40 to 80, and they picked up three currencies and a silver, so who knows what they really wanted from that lot?

You can see similarities in this design to Knizia's Ra, which debuted in 1999, the same year as Money! In both games, you're often bidding on a mixed bag of stuff with part of it being of high interest to you and another part of it of high interest to someone else and little of it of interest to others. Those conflicting desires will often inspire players to bid more than they think a lot is "really" worth in order to ensure an opponent doesn't take it — yet with Money! nothing is permanently yours until the end of the game.

In this case, the player might care only for the yen fish, with the other cards destined to be sloughed off in future bids. You're unsorting the fruit salad to take only the pineapple; everything else will go back in the bowl to end up on someone else's plate.


Another doubling! Is this a pattern or by chance? One interesting element of this design is that player desire will drive the bidding. Sometimes multiple players will bid only 10 or 20, content to increase their bidding power, while at other times a player will throw every extraneous bill into a bid to ensure they get the one card they desperately need to hit that 200 value threshold.


From 20 to 30 is a small upgrade, but what you don't know is that this player has two other pound lions in hand, one of which is a 30, which means they're two-thirds of the way to a triple. Currently that's still worth 0 points, but the potential!

The potential keeps you invested in play, and you never know how that potential might be fulfilled. The other 30 lion is either in a hand or in the deck — and if in a hand, that player might never bid with the card if they know you really want it. Depends on how desperate that player gets to win a lot...


Along those lines, the last player picked up the 40 panda, possibly only because 40 > 20, but they might also be hoping to thwart the first-turn panda picker...or to later bid 40, and if the panda picker placed a giant bid of their own, the p.p. might choose to swap their bid for the 40, which means the 40-panda bidder would go next since they now have the largest bid in front of themselves. Instead of swapping those cards, they could choose to return the bid in their hand, effectively making a swap while taking the seemingly lame "return your bid to hand" option.

The challenge, of course, is that the player who wants the 40 panda never knows exactly when you might bid it, if ever. Do they keep throwing out high bids to hope to time things right? Or do they consider it gone and play on as if it doesn't exist? Additionally, the 40 panda might only appear in a future bid with, say, a 20 jaguar peso — and the peso collector snags that lot with a larger bid.

This tangling of desires is what makes Money! so appealing: Everyone cares (or at least should care) about what everyone else is doing because you're all impacting what's available to others and how currency shifts around the table. You can't win without taking other players into account — and even then you still might not win because humans are messy and our desires don't often line up in a way that satisfies everyone.


Finally, we've filled the market for the next round of bidding. Will the player who took the 30 lion throw a huge bid at those two lions? Who's looking for yen fish? Or perhaps the 60-value bull dollar? Two gold are great for bidding and nearly 100 points, so who's going for that?

The rounds continue until the deck runs out, then you have a final round of bidding, followed by scoring. After you play a few times, you get an instinct for whether you have a chance to win by looking at your hand and recalling what else you've seen change hands. If you end up with all nine bills in a currency, for example, that's 500 points on its own: 300 for the currency itself and 200 for each triple. Miss one 20, and you're down to 380, which is a steep drop for being one bill shy of a monopoly, but them's the breaks.

Speaking of which, knowing that someone is desperate to complete a set gives you a golden opportunity for when to ditch a card. If an opponent wants yen fish and you're sitting on a 20 to play keep away, then the final 20 yen fish hits the market, well, now's the time to bid with that 20 yen fish! The opponent can't take both, which means someone else will pick it up (if they need other cards in your bid) or it will end up in the market and be joined by other cards, which means competition, which means the opponent needs to bid heavily (again) to get that card they desperately need.

After all, whatever you bid, you're giving up cards that someone else most likely wants, so you need to figure out how to give without an opponent actually profiting in the process. Ideally you can bid one card desired by one opponent and another card by another so that either one card stays away from the player who wants it or both cards end up in the market to force higher bidding next round.

I've played Money! more than a dozen times over the years, including twice on a review copy from Allplay, which will release a new edition on the U.S. market in June 2025. As with many Knizia designs, the rules are minimal and unfussy — aside from the 0-value bluff card that I whine about in the video below — but having a clear idea of the actions and the goal doesn't mean you'll be able to carry off a plan to succeed since each round brings new complications, both from the market and from your fellow players. Twenty-six years after its debut, I expect to see new editions of Money! for many decades to come...assuming that my robot parts don't break down in the meantime.

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