Bank Or Bust features Marks & Spencer branding, so I assume it’s from a collection of games, sourced and labelled as part of their large and varied product mix in the UK.
There is a heady sense of drama and intrigue when play begins with opening offshore accounts! Each player is dealt four raider cards, which could be used to conduct a raid on an opponent, repel a raid, or extract revenge. You draw cards from the central pile of the bank, building a stash of currency cards in multiple denominations. However, every now and then, just as you greedily reach for another currency card from the pile, you trigger an alarm, and in a flash, you lose all you have acquired.
Professor Richa had invited us home for dinner at the IIT Madras campus. Sitting comfortably around the nostalgically old world red oxide flooring in her flat, we discovered Bank Or Bust. Each game lasted for 15 minutes or so. Once your first stash is built, you protect it from predatory attack by covering the pile with your offshore account card. On every subsequent turn, you can move one of the offshore account cards to cover any one of your stashes, in effect leaving everything else open to attack.
Bank Or Bust is a game of steely nerves and some ruthless counter attack moves.
— The author may be contacted at arup_kavan@yahoo.com [1]
Links:
[1] mailto:arup_kavan@yahoo.com