ACTUARIAL: A MANIFESTO
Most games use chips. Plastic disks. Abstractions. They use them to protect you. They let you simulate loss without ever touching the things you actually care about.
Actuarial removes the buffer.
It argues that the concept of Priceless is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid doing the math. In the real economy—the one run by courts, insurers, and estate lawyers—everything has a number. Your marriage. Your kidney. Your golden retriever. Your memories.
This game simply prints the price tags.
I. ON THE MYTH OF THE PRICELESS
In poker, you keep your worth in one box and your chips in another. You play with the chips to protect your value and values.
In Actuarial, you are forced to acknowledge that your assets are not magical totems; they are financial instruments. Many of your achievements are in fact depreciating assets.
The game forces you to look at your life the way the market looks at it: as a pile of inventory waiting to be liquidated.
II. ON THE HORROR OF SPECIFICITY
In Poker, chips like money, are fungible. It hurts to lose a chip or a coin, but these items carry no memory.
In Actuarial, you watch your dog slide across the table to an opponent who values her only for her replacement cost.
As happens in divorce settlements and bankruptcy hearings, you experience the visceral wrongness of watching your personal history become someone else's line item. Money washes off. Losing your dog does not.
III. ON THE TRANSFER OF SENTIMENT
In Actuarial, when you win your opponent's deceased father's watch, it may be a relic to them, but to you it is callable currency.
Sentiment is not transferable. Value is.
Estate Sales are autopsies. See who will overpay simply to reclaim the emblems of that which they hold most dear.
IV. ON THE ILLIQUIDITY OF THE SOUL
In poker and any legitimate place of business, you can break a hundred. You can pay with a fifty and get back change.
In Actuarial, real assets are lumpy and illiquid. You can't pay a debt with a fraction of your law degree. You can't call a bluff with a third of your daughter's virginity. You always lose your overage.
This models Distressed Liquidation. It teaches you that being asset rich and cash poor may not always be a death sentence, but it tends to produce many sleepless nights.
The Market charges a premium for indivisibility.
V. ON THE BLAZE OF GLORY
In poker, when you cannot match the bet, you fold. You preserve your remaining stack. You live to fight another day.
In Actuarial, you're permitted to go out in a final blaze of glory, wagering every last thing of value that remains. You can call any bet, no matter the size, as long as you're willing to risk everything.
This isn't the same as a side pot. No side pots here. Merely a recognition that a life stripped of its primary assets is not worth maintaining at reduced capacity. It allows you to pose a final question to the table: Is everything I have left in the world worth more than your pair of Kings?
And sometimes the answer is no.
Reality Quantified.
Actuarial trains you to manage the decline in a life reduced to ledger entries.
The intake process generates a Fossil Record. At the end of the night, you place your plaques back into the black sleeve. That sleeve is no longer just a game component. It is a dated receipt that documents precisely what you were worth that night, and exactly what you were willing to risk.
FOUNDATIONS
The Hedonic Calculus
Jeremy Bentham (1789). The attempt to quantify pleasure and pain to determine moral value. Actuarial applies this rigor to the sentimental value of a grandmother or a hobby.
The Endowment Effect
Richard Thaler (1980). We value things more because we own them. Actuarial strips this bias away, using market data to ascertain objective worth.
Liquidity Preference Theory
John Maynard Keynes (1936). Investors demand a premium for illiquid assets. The No Change rule gamifies this penalty: holding heavy assets (Plaques) is dangerous because they cannot be spent efficiently.
Black Market Games Ludic relics for a post-ethical world.
actuarial.app | blackmarket.games © 2026. Made in the USA.
Value assessment without sentiment. Reality quantified™.