I first played Stock Market: The Game, back in roughly 1988. The game itself was meant to depict some similarity to the real share/stock market; in that the idea is to buy and sell shares and make as much money as possible - buy low and sell high.
Initially, I played an American version of the game. By memory, the game has 30 top 500 companies of whose shares you may buy and sell. Companies such as: Ford, GMC, PanAm, Mobil, Pepsi, Coke and a host of other companies of that ilk.
Interestingly, every now and then some of the companies change and you have new companies in the mix which were not there in a previous game you played. Sometime between 1989 and 1993 I came across an English (UK) version of the game which was exactly the same except that you had more companies that were English or English based.
Playing the game: At the start you type in your name and you have a choice of how many turns you will play. This can be 10, 15 or 20 turns to make as much money as possible. I recall that it was a single player game only, meaning: only one player can play at a time. Though I do have
 | | |
vaguely recall that up to 4 players can play and taking it turns to buy and sell. Though this may be with the UK version. After you have decided the difficulty of your game ( How many turns to make as much money as possible ). You are taken to a screen showing your available funds. I think you start with $20,000 by memory. You then look at all the available companies and the prices of their shares. Obviously you will buy from the company whose shares are the lowest at the start so as to make some money early. You don’t have to sell the shares either. You can keep the shares until they get to a high of anywhere between $60 and $100 a share and then the company pays dividends and you can get splits. These splits can be 2.1, 3.1 or even 4.1 which means for every share you own you will get an added 2, 3 or 4. This means your shares are worth a heap more for when you do sell and you have a lot more shares than when you started. Both the US and UK versions play out exactly the same.
You also have the option to borrow money from the bank, but the interest rates can get pretty high and you can end with nothing. If you do decide to borrow from the bank, it's a good idea to pay back what you borrowed and any interest as soon a possible. It's a very tough game to make lots of money in the 10 turn game, since it takes time for share prices to go up. that's why the 20 turn game is best as you have time to make a killing and yes, possibly go broke.
But it is fun. Anyone into simulation or management/strategy type games should have a fair bit of fun.
