CREDO
LATIN: “I BELIEVE”
A card game about where money actually comes from.
2–5Players
60–90Minutes
14+Age
LATIN: “I BELIEVE”
A card game about where money actually comes from.
Try it in ten seconds
Most people answer: from somebody else's savings. Every bank on earth would give a different answer, and the game is built on theirs.
What it is
If you want to sign a customer, you issue the money — it did not exist a second earlier, and nobody handed it over.
What you can run out of is reserves — central bank money, the only thing that settles a debt to another bank — and contracts, the capacity to take on another customer at all.
No rule in the book says the economy has to grow. Players work it out by round four, usually while trying to explain to the table why they can't pay.
01
Issue the loan, and hope they keep up their payments.
02
Your customers push money through the sectors. It passes through rival banks, and you take a cut.
03
Buy financial products from a shared pot that only pays out while new money keeps arriving.
04
Every round your rivals present their claims. Reserves, a rescue deal, or the central bank's terms.
The deck
Households, corporations, the public sector, and the financial products that bundle them up and sell them onward. Individually reasonable. Collectively, the whole reason this game exists.
Asymmetric starting conditions
Every bank starts with two specific customers already in play — no printed ability, no rules exception. The asymmetry is entirely in who you're dealt on turn one, and it quietly points you somewhere.
Defence Supplier · Prime Contractor
Lends to whoever the state is already paying.
Defence Supplier · Property Owner
Owns the block. Fixes nothing.
Tech Startup · Social Pioneer
Funds companies with equity instead of debt — the one bank that can lend without a contract.
Social Pioneer · Housing Co-op
Regenerative lending. Worse margins, until enough of the table joins in.
Power Plant · House Flipper
Heavy assets, heavier leverage.
At the table
Developed out of a monetary-system course, rebuilt as a commercial game during a dedicated design residency.
Photo — the table mid-game
Five bank tableaux, sectors mid-rotation.
Photo — the clearing phase
The moment somebody can't pay.
Photo — players
Residency playtest session.
In the box
For publishers
CREDO is a complete, playtested design: print-and-play ready, with finished prototype artwork and a working preliminary rulebook.
What you see here is a prototype, not final art. The illustrations give CREDO its voice and its direction, but they exist to make the design playable and legible — not as the intended final look. The published edition will go through its own design and art pass, most likely with human illustration rather than the AI-generated placeholder art shown here, developed together with a publisher or ahead of one.
The same is true of the rulebook: what's written works, and has been read cover to cover by real playtesters, but it's a designer's working draft. A published edition deserves a properly designed rulebook, not this one.