Four card games · One table · No internet

You set the market.

Exchange Alley is a compendium of four market-themed card games played face to face over Bluetooth. Host a table on your phone, deal your friends in, and let the floor decide who profits. No servers. No accounts. No signal — just the people in the room.

Coming soon — in TestFlight beta now

The Exchange Alley home screen: a gold art-deco masthead over a shelf of games — Book Builder, Bull Run, The Rally and Circuit Breaker, each an Exchange Alley game

Est. 1698 · Cornhill, London

There was a real Exchange Alley. London's stockjobbers were thrown out of the Royal Exchange for rowdiness, set up in the coffee houses of a passage off Cornhill, and ran the stock market from there for seventy-five years — with no building, no institution and no wires. Read the story ↓

One floor. Four games.

NO INTERNET. JUST BLUETOOTH.

Phones close together, Bluetooth on — that's the whole setup. No servers, no accounts, no signal required. The table travels with you.

ONE PORTFOLIO, ONE RANK

Every ranked game feeds a single Portfolio Value. Climb from Bronze to Diamond, and rank against the friends you've actually played.

COMPETITIVE & CO-OP

Cut-throat auctions and penalty-dodging on one shelf; silent, nervy co-operation on the other. Same table, same friends, whichever mood the night takes.

PRACTICE FOR FREE

Bull Run, Book Builder and Circuit Breaker each deal a solo table against the Robos — offline, unranked, and free. The Rally is people-only; silence needs a room.

The games

Two shelves. On Live Markets you play for keeps — every result moves your portfolio. On Alternate Markets the whole table wins or loses as one.

Book Builder

An Exchange Alley game ● Live Markets

Book Builder: a sealed-bid auction for SpectraForge, a $45M bid entered on the deco company card

Build your book. Corner the sectors.

A sealed-bid auction. Everyone — including the seller — privately names a price for the stock on the block, and the highest sealed bid wins. Everyone can see what you own; nobody can see what you can still afford — and that gap is the whole game.

Float a stock to talk up its sector. When the round settles, only the top three sectors by volume pay out — back a sector that goes quiet and you're left holding air. Keep enough hidden cash to win the auctions that matter.

Book building is the real term for privately collecting bids to set a price — and here you're building your own book, too.

3–6 playersCompetitiveBluff & bankroll

Bull Run

An Exchange Alley game ● Live Markets

Bull Run: the four market rows mid-round with an engraved bull-and-bear hand card

Play your cards. Time the market. Survive the run.

The flagship. Four market rows, and every card you play is a trade — land the sixth card in a row and the market crashes on you. Deploy your whole hand, dodge the bullhead penalties, and hold the fewest when the closing bell rings.

Three markets to trade — the classic Original, the two-sided Professional, and open-outcry Open — plus a Thin Market toggle where counting cards becomes the edge.

2–6 playersCompetitiveFast & tactical

The Rally

An Exchange Alley game ● Alternate Markets · Co-op

Climb together. Hold your nerve. Rise as one.

The floor's opposite mood: one desk, no talking, no turns. Everyone plays their cards onto a single shared pile in ascending order — you simply have to sense when your lowest card is the lowest in play.

Misjudge a trade and the desk loses margin; run dry and you're liquidated. Put your hand on the table to signal you're ready, feel the market open on every device at once, and see how high the table can climb.

2–4 playersCo-operativeSilent & tense

Circuit Breaker

An Exchange Alley game ● Alternate Markets · Co-op

Circuit Breaker: a cross mid-execution with brass-switch card backs, the stress-phase meter and desk directive above

The market's in freefall. Trip the halt.

The desk survives together or not at all. The market is melting down, and the halt buys you just enough room to steer every client's book through the crash — one coordinated cross at a time: one led sector, everyone follows, highest holding takes the fill.

Regulation puts a wall between you: no table talk, no revealing your hand, one sanctioned disclosure per phase. Safe-haven assets override everything — knowing when to burn one is most of the game. Clear the stress phases and the breaker holds.

3–5 playersCo-operativeEscalating missions

There was a real Exchange Alley.

In 1698 the stockjobbers of London were turned out of the Royal Exchange. They were too loud and too disreputable for the merchants upstairs, so they walked a few dozen yards down the road and set up in a narrow passage between Cornhill and Lombard Street, dealing across the tables of two coffee houses: Jonathan's and Garraway's.

That same year a broker named John Castaing began posting a list of stock and commodity prices on the wall at Jonathan's. He called it The Course of the Exchange. It is the ancestor of every ticker that has scrolled along the bottom of a screen since — including the one at the top of this page.

Twenty-two years later the alley was the epicentre of the South Sea Bubble. Fortunes were made and destroyed across those same tables through 1720, though Defoe had already published the guidebook the year before — a pamphlet titled The Anatomy of Exchange Alley: or, a System of Stock-Jobbing. The traders eventually formalised themselves, moved out in 1773, and became the London Stock Exchange.

So for seventy-five years the most consequential financial market in the world had no building, no institution, and no wires. It was a few people in a room, reading each other across a table.

That is exactly the game we wanted to make.

No servers. No accounts. No internet. Just the people at your table — the way it was done in the alley.

The alley is still there, running off Cornhill in the City of London. Look for the sign that reads Change Alley, EC3V — 'Change being the old contraction of the Royal Exchange. It is easy to walk straight past.

Ready to enter the market?

Exchange Alley is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone and iPad. Free to download, and free to join any table, forever. Grab three friends, switch Bluetooth on, and open the floor.