Trash Traders

Trash Traders is a game from Hong Kong. You are raccoons. Now this is not a game about raccoons’ natural habitat or ecology or saving the planet. Instead it is about speculating in cryptocurrency and losing all your money. Raccoons love digging through trash so in this game you trade trash stocks. You win by having as little money left as possible. 

This is a take that type card game. You start with some money. Many of the cards in the game let you manipulate the crypto price. On your turn you may play a card to use its power. There are all sorts of powers. Changing the crypto price is just one of them. You then must buy or sell crypto. Everybody knows crypto is trash and normally they will be worth nothing when the market crashes and the game ends. So you want to waste all your money on crypto. Two things make this a little challenging. If you have spent all your money buying crypto and can’t buy any more, you will be forced to sell. The golden rule is every turn you must either buy or sell. You can’t do nothing. You might end up selling at a high price and making a profit, which is bad in this game. 

The other complication is some crypto are protected from the crash. They are still worth something at game end and not zero. When you buy crypto, you buy from a face down deck, so you don’t know whether the card you draw is a real trash crypto. If you get a “good” crypto, you will want to try to sell it and then use the money to buy hopefully real trash crypto. That takes two more turns which you might not have. The game ends immediately when a market crash card is drawn. Maybe you only have time to reduce the value of those “good” crypto. 

This is a silly party game that is good for casual players. There is some market manipulation and tactics. This is not just dumb attacking. I probably shouldn’t call it a take that game. It is more than that. It is still a simple game. It funded successfully on Kickstarter, and it has several expansions that offer different ways of playing. 

Expansions