Money for Mars

WHY

We wanted a way to surface the hidden assumptions inside Earth-based financial systems — and suspected the fastest route was building something that couldn't use any of them.

WHAT IT IS

A card-based design exercise that asks participants to invent financial systems for space environments. Players draw three cards — a location, a persona, a type of financial tool — and have to make something that would actually work there. The constraints are specific enough to block hand-waving but strange enough to block importing familiar solutions.

DESIGN DECISION

Financial literacy isn't a prerequisite. We tried earlier versions that front-loaded concepts—explaining what a derivative is before asking players to design one. It didn't work. People either already knew and got bored, or didn't know and got intimidated. The current structure flips it: the scenario creates demand for the solution. Players invent credit systems or insurance mechanisms because the situation requires it, not because they understood how those things worked going in. The learning happens in the debrief, when the facilitator names what they just built. The exercise teaches finance by forcing you to need it.

ONE OBSERVATION

In space, nobody shares a clock. A Martian sol drifts against Earth time. A station in Jupiter orbit has no meaningful "day." Light-lag means a transaction confirmed "now" might be disputed twenty minutes later by someone who hasn't received it yet. We expected this to be one theme among several. It turned out to be the crack that opened everything else. Once participants see that time itself is a design choice embedded in money, they stop treating any of it as natural.

Iterated: 2017–2026