About 10 years ago Love Letter left quite an impression on the gaming scene. Not only did some people discover Asia as a potential region for innovative and exciting games. People also started to realise that minimalism can be a valuable feature of a game’s design. Admittedly Vegetable Stock is not a Japanese design, yet it still benefits from our understanding that an Asian design shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Because Vegetable Stock is a small, ingenious card game that manages to evoke a lot of emotions with a simple deck of cards.

At its core, Vegetable Stock is a game about stock speculation. The pun in the game’s title already hints at this. What’s impressive about the design, is that it manages to capture the thrill that shapes such speculation games so effortlessly. It doesn’t need some nested mechanisms to do so, as you would find in a game like Tulip Bubble. Neither the game’s flow, nor its decision points require any complexity to capture the unstable nature of the stock market.

Using only 60 cards, designer Zong-Hua Yang manages to depict the fluctuating prices for each stock (vegetable type) and also – which is the actual design feat – ties them to the decision of its players. We individually choose our stock package from a card display, leaving a single card behind, which changes the value of the vegetables shown on it. After six short rounds, our stocks pay out. Each vegetable icon in our six stock packages pays according to its stock price.

All this plays quickly and still manages to feel like an emotional roller-coaster. When the vegetable you’ve invested in won’t change in value, because everybody is picking up stocks for themselves, it’s an outrage! When that very same stock plummets, because it doesn’t get picked up by anyone else, it’s even worse. Soon you’re invested in the cards other players pick up or leave on the table. You start to calculate and speculate how prices for your favored type of vegetable might change next turn.

This comes with a robust and easily grasped set of rules, reminiscent of card game classics like Kakerlaken Poker or 6 Nimmt!. Small card games, that fit in your pocket: quick to explain, quick to play and quick to make people laugh.

If you can look beyond the colorful icons, you might even chuckle at how accurately Vegetable Stock manages to inhabit the unrestrained sense of gambling of the original stock speculation games, played in markets in New York, Frankfurt or Tokyo. Money only exists at the end, and for the sole purpose of figuring out who won. Any prediction or theory as to which stock will go up, and which will go down, is often based on nothing but superstition, chutzpah and, frankly, moon logic. But at least at the table, nobody will have any delusions of self-importance or power, because they made more money than somebody else.

Vegetable Stock is a small, minimalist design. Despite all of its rules fitting on a single card, the game doesn’t need more agency or sophisticated expert variants. Vegetable Stock is simply the essence of a stock speculation game.