Designing Exchangeopoly: A Boardgame to Explore Value Exchange within Communities

In this pictorial, we discuss the design of Exchangeopoly, a boardgame developed to investigate exchanges between people in communities when they help each other out. Such exchanges are often acts of kindness for forms of volunteering that are not remunerated financially and are built on social capital. The boardgame scaffolded explorations of scenarios with participants where informal altruistic interactions in their communities are tokenised, rewarded and incentivised. We focus on the designed-in features and considerations that went into the visual and material production of the game and its gameplay mechanics. We discuss how Exchangeopoly was a valuable method that surfaced existing and speculated practices of exchange, and supported participants to explore the opportunities and problems of representing and rewarding such interactions. We contribute insights about the usefulness of exchangeopoly as a tool to explore scenarios and surface tensions about tokenisation in community value exchange.