Money charts are about prices and quantities: what a thing cost, how many were sold, how big an industry became. They are the most familiar data in the world — everyone has a feeling about the price of milk or a house — and that familiarity is exactly what makes them hard.
A price series can look like a straight climb and then spend a decade unwinding in real terms. A sales series can double and then halve when the category changes. A money chart in Extraplot is chosen because the hidden window contains something a reasonable person would not have drawn: a reversal, a plateau, a shock that stuck.
What kinds of charts appear
- Consumer prices: milk, eggs, bread, petrol, airfares, concert tickets.
- Assets: house prices, rents, bitcoin's annual range.
- Industries: sales totals, market sizes, minimum wage, trade figures.
- Company histories: a business's revenues or locations over time.
How scoring behaves on money charts
The central difficulty is nominal versus real. Prices in cash terms almost always rise over long spans, but a spike can unwind while the long-term slope continues. The chart's unit and title tell you which series you are drawing; ignore them and you will systematically over-forecast.
Money charts also have hard boundaries that players miss. A price can crash quickly and recover slowly. A market share cannot exceed 100%. A count of stores can go to zero. When the visible line is already extreme, the hidden window is more likely to be a reversion than a continuation — and the bank filters out charts where the simple continuation would have worked.
Drawing advice for money charts
- Check the scale and unit: dollars, cents, index points and percentages have different ceilings.
- Ask whether the visible rise is nominal inflation, a real shift, or a speculative spike. They unwind differently.
- After a sharp shock, draw a partial reversion rather than a full return. Markets rarely undo everything.
- Long price series usually keep a positive slope; do not draw decades of decline unless the quantity is shrinking.
- When the chart is about sales of a format, remember that a new format can end the old one faster than the trend suggests.
Why this is the smallest category
Money is roughly one chart in fifteen across the season. The category is small on purpose: price data is plentiful, but genuinely surprising price histories with a reliable public source are rarer than they look. Rather than pad it, the bank keeps money charts infrequent and memorable.
It is also the category most likely to teach you something you can use outside the game. Knowing that a price series tends to revert, that a nominal rise may be inflation, and that a collapsing format rarely comes back is a decent mental toolkit for reading any economic chart you meet.