Banking game: how the bank decides what you pay
Search for a banking game and you mostly find games where you are the bank — idle tycoons printing money, simulators with queues of customers. Lapline puts you on the other side of the counter, where most of us actually live: it’s a board game where the bank is the thing you borrow from, owe, and occasionally lose a street to. This is a tutorial on how its bank works — which is, in miniature, how the real kind works.
Rule one: the bank lends against what you own
Lapline’s bank will lend you up to half the value of your streets. Own nothing, borrow nothing — your first street is always bought with cash. This is the rule that stops a loan being free money, and it has a sneaky consequence: a street bought with borrowed money uses up more borrowing room than it creates. Each loan makes the next one smaller. The ladder narrows as you climb it.
Rule two: every open loan makes the next one dearer
Your first loan is cheap — a few coins per hundred, each lap. But the price the bank quotes rises with every loan you already have open. In practice the first loan on a decent street pays for itself easily, and the second loan is the one to think hard about: on this board a street earns back roughly a tenth of its price each lap in rent, and the second loan costs more than that.
The game shows you both numbers before you press the button — what the loan costs each lap, and what the street can earn. The whole skill of the banking half of the game is refusing loans where those numbers are the wrong way round.
Rule three: a loan keeps the rate it was written at
This is the rule the boom and bust turns on. When the market meter climbs, rents rise — and so does the price of new loans. When it crashes, both fall. But a loan you already signed never changes its price. Borrow cheap in a slump and that cheap money is yours for the rest of the game. Borrow dear at the top of a boom and you keep paying boom prices long after the boom rents that justified them are gone.
That’s why the crash hurts exactly the players it should: the ones who signed the most expensive paper at the top. If you pay debt down while the meter is high and borrow again after the crash, you are doing the thing the game was built to teach.
Rule four: the bill is on a clock, and the clock always wins
Interest is due every time you pass the Lap Line — twelve bills in twelve laps, whether rent came in that lap or not. Pay it from your pocket if you can. If you can’t, the bank takes a street and sells it cheap to the richest rival who can pay. You keep what’s left of the sale money, so a bad lap stings without ending your game — but the street is gone, and everyone at the board saw it go.
Only the bank’s bill can cost you a street. Unpaid rent to another player just goes unpaid — being poor isn’t punished; borrowing more than you could carry is.
Paying back is a move, not an apology
There’s a “Pay back” button whenever you have spare money and open debt, and it always pays off your dearest loan first — which drops the price of your next loan a whole step. Paying debt down in a boom, so you can borrow big in the slump, is the strongest line in the game.
Read next: the budgeting game guide for the money-in, money-out half, and financial literacy games that are actually games for where this fits.
Play Lapline free — twelve laps against the bank, in your browser, no download.