Kevin Nunn wrote about Game Currencies and gave us a definition of currency applicable to game design.

“something that players spend in the game to exchange for something else in the game.”

I’m designing a board game about Proterozoic organisms evolving in a primordial soup (think: the Cell Stage of Spore) and I’m pondering the sorts of currencies one might find in an economy of evolution.

Here are a couple of possibilities:

• Population.
  • When an organism flourishes within its niche, it accumulates population.
  • Population can be spent to spread territorial range.
• Change.
  • When an organism meets adversity and fails, it accumulates change.
  • Change can be spent to mutate and evolve.

What currencies would you expect to find in an evolutionary Ursuppe? I asked that question on Twitter and got some good replies.