Debrief: Money! by Reiner Knizia

We break down Money! by Reiner Knizia, a quick blind-bidding card game where scoring thresholds and trio bonuses create sharp, swingy decisions. We compare it to High Society and other Knizia auctions, talk player counts, and share who should consider adding it to a shelf.

• core rules overview and scoring thresholds
• trio bonuses and their swing potential
• blind bidding and market swap decisions
• reading opponents and timing value shifts
• three player flow versus larger groups
• comparisons to High Society and Cat Blues
• who should buy now versus wait and try
• final thoughts on fun versus standout status

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Table For Money
• 1:16 How Scoring Actually Works
• 3:58 Blind Bidding And Market Swaps
• 6:10 Strategy: Value Shifts And Timing
• 8:26 Player Count And Flow Differences
• 9:40 Comparing Knizia’s Auction Lineage
• 12:13 Is Money Worth Owning
• 13:21 Listener Support And Feedback
• 15:10 Local Game Store Anecdote And Wrap

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:15

Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast. Today, get your pocketbooks out. Get your checkbooks ready. Because we are talking money by Renner Kenizia. Joining me as always is Clayton Gable. How are you doing, Clay?

SPEAKER_01: 0:30

I'm doing good, man. I'm feeling flush with the green. Ready to talk about some money.

SPEAKER_00: 0:35

Money, money, money. Uh, is it is it money, or do you have to shout it because there's an exclamation point?

SPEAKER_01: 0:41

I think if you sound excited in some way, I don't know if you need to shout, Travis.

SPEAKER_00: 0:46

Maybe if it was all caps, but yeah, okay. Money, money, money.

SPEAKER_01: 0:51

It's money. Let's talk about money. All right, let's talk money. Uh all play. Just reprinted this sucker. Yep. I'm hot for all play, and I'm hot for this game's designer, Reiner Kenizia. So I picked it up, and it also has one of my favorite mechanisms, which is bidding. So here we are talking about money because I was obviously going to buy it and play it. In money, you are essentially trying to collect sets of different types of currencies, with these, of course, anthropomorphic animals as the as the spokespeople for that uh different currency. So, you know, you have your weird-looking fish currency. The YouTube is pulling up an older version, but trust me when I say in the all-play version, you have like the money with the giraffe, you know, the American-looking dollars or cows, all that to say I'm painting a picture for you, but really they're just different suits of money cards. And at the end of the game, you're trying to get points for each of those suits. And the way you get points, of course, it's some obscure scoring curriculum that Kenitsi has come up with. So if you manage to get 200 or more dollars in that currency, you can score the full value of that currency. Okay. So if in the green cow currency I had$250, that goes down in my checkbook as$250. Now in the giraffe currency, I don't even know if there's a giraffe, it might have been a kangaroo. In the kangaroo currency, if you get land in that 100 to 200 range, so say I got$112 in giraffe, you just subtract$100 right off the top, and then you get$12. So when you're under 200 but still over 100, you subtract 100, and that's your score for that currency.

SPEAKER_00: 3:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 3:05

And then the worst tier, if you didn't quite get 100 of that currency, you just get zero for it. They're worthless, they mean nothing to you. And then there's gold and silver cards that you know don't fluctuate with the markets, they are just worth what they are. And so there's, you know, like$10 golds or$10 silvers and$20 golds that you can collect as well. The other way you score points is by collecting sets of three. So you can collect sets of three. So if I had three green cow 20s, that's an extra 100 points at the end of the game. If I had three green cow 30s, that's another 100 points.

SPEAKER_00: 3:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 3:49

So regardless of if you scored that currency or not, if you can collect three of the same suit of the same value, you get 100 points for that at the end of the game. And that applies to the silver and gold cards as well. So that's the scoring, and that's honestly the most complicated part of the way this game is played. Um, because how it's played is you get dealt a hand of, I think, six cards to start, you get one zero dollar, you know, zero value currency that you can put in your hand, everybody has it, and that's essentially the bluff width because every it's going to be a blind auction. Everybody's going to take currency from their hand and bid it to the table, and then everybody reveals. And if you bid the most value of money, you get to go first. And what you're doing is you're making a decision. So the market in the middle of the table has a left and right side. On each side, there's four random cards, currency cards. And when you're it's your turn to act during a round, because I say I was the highest bidder, I can choose to either take somebody else's bid and swap with them, and now their cards are mine, or I can choose to swap my bid with one side of the market or the other side of the market. But if I don't like any of that, I can just keep my bid as my cards. So it's uh interesting decision that like uh like any auction game, you're you know, trying to figure out what the value of things is and yeah, how much do I need to bid to win in this round or not? And does it even matter if I come in last? Am I still gonna get something that's um good? And I don't know that I cracked the code on that, but it was interesting trying to figure out which cards because you're you're giving up your cards when you bid them, so yeah, you know, you're like, okay, I am not doing well in the kangaroo suit, so I'm gonna bid out you know a couple kangaroo cards, but then you have to consider the fact that somebody else might be collecting kangaroo cards, yeah. When I swap with the market, now they're available to them, and now they're really beefing up their currency and that. So it's this cool little market. I I wouldn't dig too much into it. I think it's an engaging little game that you know took maybe 20 minutes, and you know, it has uh bidding which I enjoy. The the set collection was fun, it was nice kind of building up my hand of a certain suit of card. Uh yeah, it's a Kenitian auction game from 1999.

SPEAKER_00: 6:57

This one sounds interesting. I don't know if it would be my preferred Kenithia auction game, though. I mean, he's got uh but what you said was kind of interesting. Like the auction game is always about what is this card actually worth? What is this item that that I'm auctioning for actually worth to me? This one sounds like it's what is this worth to me right now, and what is it worth to other people right now? And because you're bidding blind, that changes things, right? Yeah. If I knew somebody was collecting kangaroo cards and they might have, if I had to guess that they're like between 100 and 200, we're running up kind of on the end of the game, those kangaroo cards are probably worth significantly more than they were at the beginning of the game for them. Yeah, and like that value changes as you go along. Uh there's probably a lot more to keep track of here than like what do I want in the market? What am I willing to pay for it?

SPEAKER_01: 7:55

There's probably like some deep strategy that goes on, but yeah, I didn't pay any attention to what everybody else was collecting. So I and I only played this once at three players. So I imagine the experience is pretty different at you know, four or five with more people, because usually it was uh one person takes the left side of the market, one person takes the right, the other person, you know, takes the scraps of what was left over. Because you know, now that that stuff's in the market, the cards you bid that's available for someone else to take.

SPEAKER_00: 8:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 8:34

So and then at the end of the round, you refill both market sides up to four. Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 8:40

So your your cards go out, like if I bid two kangaro cards, my two kangaroo cards are now part of the market, and then we flip two more to fill it.

SPEAKER_01: 8:50

Yep, yep. And then the new and then the new round starts. So then you're just looking at okay, what of these cards am I willing to bid and potentially lose this round? And you reveal and you, you know, go in currency order and decide what you want. Again, it's like super simple once you're in the gameplay of it, and once you understand like the scoring of like gotta be above 200, it's almost like got that Lost Cities feel of you know, you once you embark on something, you want to really see it succeed, or else it's not really worth doing. Uh, it's not quite as punishing as Lost Cities, where you can lose a ton of points, but it's still kind of had that feel of like, all right, I gotta pick my couple currencies that I want to try and get above that hundred or two hundred mark, and then you know, see if I can get some sets elsewhere to kind of fill out my scoring.

SPEAKER_00: 9:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 9:45

I'd play it again for sure, but yeah, like I said, in a world of a million amazing auction bidding games, a lot of which are designed by Mr. Kenitia himself. Yeah, it's not the like most standout, but it's serviceable and it's in an all-play size box that I like having on my shelf. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, it's not much else to really say about money.

SPEAKER_00: 10:09

I think do you know the I I don't want to put you on the spot if you don't know it, but I wonder what the lineage is between like this and some of his other auction games. Like, was this a stepping stone to high society or one of his other like more highly renowned auction games? Or is this like a standalone thing that was developed alongside all these other auction games that he has?

SPEAKER_01: 10:32

Yeah, I don't know. This was kind of right in the heart of a lot of those games he was putting out, I think, in 1999. Just give High Society a Google real quick, quick, and see where that let's go with Google, yeah. Yeah, so 95. Okay, so this is post high society. He's he's tinkering around with the card-based auctions. Um interesting, yeah, and it feels a lot like another um game I played of his, and I've only played it once, and I played it a while ago, so forgive me, internet. If but it my feelings are what they are and they're valid. So when I played Cat Blues, the big gig, oh yeah, a Bitewing put that out. It's another reprint of an older Keniza game. It has a very kind of similar vibe where you're having to bid with cards from your hand and you get to take cards from uh you know face-up market based on what you bid. So, you know, he he definitely is one to tinker and meddle with these mechanisms and kind of create different unique works of art with them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 11:48

Do you think that this fills any sort of like if I already have high society, if I already have some of his other larger Bitewing games, if I have, you know, if I'm a fan of Reiner Kenita's auction games and I already have some on my shelf, is this worth picking up, or is it worth like waiting to find it used somewhere?

SPEAKER_01: 12:13

It is different in that it's you know a blind auction, yeah, which a lot of those other games aren't. They're like escalating type auctions. Um yeah, I mean, I wouldn't rush out to grab it. It's it'll be around and it's it was good. Like it it makes sense, it works, and I had fun playing it. I had fun playing a lot of games. So I mean you can't it sounds like a negative review coming from me because I'm so flowery about things and like oh my god, it's the best thing ever. But sometimes games are just good and it's fine.

SPEAKER_00: 12:55

Like I mean, Renner Kenita has done like hundreds and hundreds of games at this point. Yeah, not all of them are great, and that's okay. Yeah, we appreciate the good doctor for what he does for the board gaming space, and uh you know, not all of them have to be the game. Yeah, and they couldn't be.

SPEAKER_01: 13:19

Yeah, but yeah, that's money.

SPEAKER_00: 13:21

Oh since we have a couple extra minutes, I just want to thank people for watching and listening to the show. Uh, if you are watching on YouTube, give us a thumbs up, write in the comments, tell us what we can do better, give us some real feedback. We love hearing that stuff. Subscribe to the channel because when we do get this right and when we do improve our uh show based on your feedback that you're giving us in real time, uh, we want you to be subscribed so that you can follow up and say, Hey, look, I contributed to making this show better. Uh so thank you. And go ahead and share the show. Tell tell your friends, tell your family, tell your game groups, tell your friendly local game store. And uh yeah, thanks for thanks for supporting the show. Thanks for watching.

SPEAKER_01: 14:08

I didn't even I didn't even tell my new friendly local game store. Oh, he doesn't know you're famous yet. That's yeah, that's a lot to ask of our listeners. If I'm not even willing to yeah, I went there. Sorry, another sidebar. Um, if you tuned in just to hear about money, go ahead and turn this off. But also, so I went in and I picked up a choir at this game store. And the guy's like, Duh, great game. This and he says, This was actually just featured at the World Series of Board Gaming. Nice. You would think you or Jared probably would have segued into a, you know, I said I was there, and yes, it was, and I'm excited to play this game. And he was like, Oh my god, really? You were there? Like, did you compete? I was like, No, I was just hanging out. Yeah, you or Jared probably would have been like, Yeah, I got a podcast and we were out there, you know, doing this, and yeah, probably would have handed out a sticker, done something a little more engaging than what I did, which was just shluff it off and then proceed to leave the store as quickly as I could.

SPEAKER_00: 15:14

Listen, Tom Vassal doesn't become the board game icon that he is without taking a few photos with some fans, Clay. You gotta get out there and and schmooze a little bit with your friendly local game store, with the people on the street that just wanna ask for game recommendations. You gotta ham it up a little bit.

SPEAKER_01: 15:33

Hey, I'll hammer it. All right, all right, all right. So, anyway, tell your friendly local game store because clearly I'm not capable of advertising for myself.

SPEAKER_00: 15:44

And if you live in Pennsylvania, go ahead and go and make a trip and tell Clay's friendly local game store about Clay and about the show. So, all right, we've beat this to death. I have been Travis, he has been Clay. This has been money, money, money by All Play and developed by Runner Kiniti. And we're out.