My family, during the summer holidays by the sea, used to spend the evening playing several board games. And WALL STREET was my preferred one.
WALL STREET is the classical financial game where your goal is to accumulate the most amount of capitals (shares, precious metals and cash) in a given term of time, or to be the last one in play when all the other players went bankrupt.
Until now, nothing new.
The things that make peculiar this product of Italo Cremona Electronics are the components. As a matter of fact, WALL STREET offers pawns, cards, shares, facsimiles of old (very old!) liras – Italian currency before Euro -, a big board in hard plastic with… printed circuits connected to an electronic monitor!
This monitor is similar to a TV and it is bigger than a current laptop: it works both as a die and as a “Stock Exchange computer”. It is, in practice, the randomizer element of the game.
This “monitor” is simply a plastic object with 8 leds (4 red ones and 4 green ones) and some electronic circuits supplied by 4 huge torch batteries, but, 15-20 years ago, it certainly played a great fascination on a 10 years old (or little more) kid!

The game starts after each of the 2-6 players has received the established initial amount of money, shares (chemical, building, financial and oil-shares) and precious metals (platinum, gold, silver and copper).
The Startspieler presses one of the red circles painted on the board and, by doing so, he closes the circuit and activates the leds on the monitor, then he moves his pawn forward a number of spaces equal to the (0 to 4) green lights that lighted on and performs the actions shown on the space on which the pawn ends its turn.
Some of these spaces require the use of the Stock Exchange computer: e.g. Metal Auction (Asta Metalli), where a player has the right to acquire, from the other players or from the bank, precious metals at a random price determined by pressing one of the red buttons. Another example is the Shares Exchange (Borsa Azioni) where, always using the electronic monitor, you can bid on the trend of the shares you own, gaining or losing money.
There are, then, spaces that allow acquiring ordinary or preferred shares at a fixed price, and other spaces that force to pay dividends to the players that own certain types of shares.
If in Italian MONOPOLY you could collect 20,000 liras if you simply passed through the starting square, here you need to stop exactly on the Stock Exchange Opening (Apertura Borsa) to collect 30,000 liras.
The space to avoid, instead, is the Crack that forces to pay 10,000 liras per ordinary share and 20,000 liras per preferred share you own.

On the opposite of the board there is the wished Arbitrage (Arbitraggio), that gives you the indisputable right to exchange one of your shares with another share from another player (also an ordinary share against a preferred one!).
The sale of shares is always allowed during the game, and this increases a bit the interaction among the players; although I have always some doubts on free exchange in competitive games (yes, even in THE SETTLERS OF CATAN).
The game is enlivened also by the Market Information cards, which remember the famous Community Chest and Chance cards of MONOPOLY.

After all, WALL STREET is a game with very simple rules and very chance prone: it is sufficient to think that quotations of shares and metals randomly change at every click. It is not possible to plan a winning strategy except the one to try to accumulate as most as possible (in quantity and typology) to survive (almost) undamaged through the possible accidents that surely you will face. On the other hand the mechanism of the electronic board, surely very advanced (and expensive) for that time, has still an undeniable charm.