Games Like Liquidity

It's 1995. You have a desk, a workstation, some startup cash, and a banking licence. Everything else — the products, the customers, the trading book, the reputation — you build yourself.

Liquidity is a deep, complex, and realistic management simulation about running a bank: pricing risk, funding your book, and staying solvent while you grow.

Design and price your own products: personal loans, mortgages, credit cards, deposit accounts. And compete against rival banks for every customer. Approve or decline each credit application on its merits: the borrower's rating, the notional, the rate, your appetite.

Reserve requirements are checked nightly. Capital adequacy is watched. Fall short, and the central bank steps in as lender of last resort, at a cost to your reputation. If people get scared they withdraw their money. It’s your job to avoid a bank run.

Liquidity contains a highly detailed market simulation which runs underneath the game, with shifting regimes, sector correlations, earnings, and a procedural order book. This is the 1990’s: there are no web apps for trading. To access it you must use a command-line dealing terminal.

Sell share-dealing and index-tracker products to your customers, then hedge the risk in the market.

In liquidity, different phenomena emerge at different speeds. At low speeds you handle requests yourself. At higher speeds you need to keep on top of rate decisions, macroeconomic data, and developing crises.

With a logarithmic time control, you can play from real time to 100,000×, where a day passes in less than a second.