Pax Greenspan

Wall Street, 2003–2008. You run an investment bank during the credit boom that built the subprime crisis.

Building on Phil Eklund's Pax system, Pax Greenspaniana uses tableau-building, dynamic loyalties, and event-driven scoring to model the era. Hire originators, structurers, traders, and ratings contacts.

Securitize mortgages into tranches — colored dice from prime green to subprime red. Repackage them, drop them in the pool, sell them on. Or buy protection and short the whole thing.

Every player picks a side, long or short, but loyalties drift with your tableau and a public switch costs you. Leverage scales your market cap and your exposure in equal measure. The pool fills with risk no one can trace.

The cascade ends the game: defaults realize, counterparties fail, funding dries up. Whoever positioned correctly wins. Everyone else gets bought, bailed, or buried.

Named historical cast — Mozilo, Fuld, Cassano, Burry, Paulson, Lippmann, Bernanke, Serageldin, and others — each card carrying a real-world function.

—description from the designer