Last night we played another round of CommonPoly here in Amsterdam.

Commonpoly is a game - more than loosely based on Monopoly ;) - that was developed to get input from workshop participants on the design and implementation of both the complementary (crypto)currency and digital wallet to be used on the Commonfare.net platform. 

In Commonpoly each participant plays a predefined character that either has the possibility to generate his or her own income or not. These characters share some resemblances to real people we met during the research phase of our project. Players get the opportunity to change the rules of the game in General Assemblies. The goal of the game is to create a situation were all players can make it though their rounds without facing financial hardship. A pre-prepared stack of ‘Meta Question Cards’ dealing with the larger economy or financial instruments outside of the reality of the game is introduced to facilitate more discussions. 

Needless to say, CommonPoly is constantly ‘under construction’ and improvements suggested by the participants are implemented after each session. The game is currently undergoing a full make-over and as soon as that is done, we will create printable PDF’s so that everybody everywhere can play it and send us their feedback to inform the design of the Commonfare.net tools.

We are also considering creating an online version of the game for Commonfare.net…