No clock yet. Look as long as you like.
No clock yet. Look as long as you like.
A cargo of North Sea crude is in your hands and it has to go somewhere. You do not want the oil. You want your cut for placing it — and you only get that when you are out of the deal clean. The black climbing the paper is the cargo running out of days. If it reaches the top the barrels are yours.
The whole circle (the earliest pip, the thickest glow) pays the most and takes the bill off the board — you are out of that cargo completely, so you get safer and your book gets smaller. An inner circle pays less cash — it always will, because the whole circle contains it — and the house you flicked at takes over what is left, so the bill and its head ticks stay in play and your book stays fat. The plate tells you which is which before you flick: the whole circle says OFF THE BOARD, an inner one says what the bill KEEPS. More paper working is more paper to drown in. Neither one is right.
A long chain pays much more, runs out of days much faster, and comes back to you sooner. The same chain sets both numbers: a bigger payout and less time. Bills waiting behind your hand keep darkening but can never black out — the one that kills you is always the one you were holding. The bar across the bottom of the bill in your hand is how many seconds it has left, one notch per second (every two seconds on the long clocks of the first few moves) — a fat chain visibly has fewer notches.
The run opens with one bill and no clock at all: it does not start running down until you flick it, so you can read the board for as long as you like. The cabinet marks the house to send it to, then marks one more, and by then a house is glowing gold — flick there and you have done the whole rule of the game once. Those first moves run on a clock more than twice as slow as the real one, and after that first booked-out circle the paper in your hand waits a few seconds more while the stamp lands. Only then do the dates start to matter, and a second bill arrive, and a third, and then the floor is yours.
In the Brent forward crude market of the 1980s one cargo was bought and sold down a long "daisy chain" of houses before anyone knew when it would load. Spot a circle in that chain and the houses inside it can settle in cash instead — booked out. Their legs cancel and they are out of it. The cargo is not: the ship still loads, and the oil goes to whoever actually wanted it, usually a refinery at the end of the chain. Your cut on each leg you placed is the money, and traders call that cut the turn.
But a cargo can only be booked out until a loading date is attached to it. After that it is wet — real barrels, on a real day — and whoever is still holding it lifts the whole cargo at the price on their own contract, with the tanker they chartered charging them a fixed sum for every day it is kept waiting. That charge has a name too: demurrage. Missing the deadline had a name on the floor as well. You had been clocked. All of that is real, and it is this whole game.