Illuminati Money Question

[Acererak]

I played my first game of Illuminati and it was a lot of fun. (Y2k and Bavarian fire drill are now on their way) I'm not a big fan of the paper money though, they got blown around and felt cheap. I'm planning on replacing them with koplow mini poker chips.

My question is how important is it to be able to hide the amount of money on each card? I'm torn between ordering different color poker chips for different values or ordering all green and labeling them with values.

Using different colors would be more convenient, and would allow me to easily use the chips for other games, but then it would be easy for your opponents to tell how much money is on each group. I've only played the one time and we were all pretty open with our money because we were all learning the game.

Can any more experienced Illuminati players chime in with some advice?

[PK]

I do think that it would change the game significantly if anyone could just look at a group and easily tell how much money was on it (assuming it had at least a few chips). But one way to fix that would be to use different colored chips, but then take a black sharpie around the outer edge, so that when they're stacked, it's just a sea of black.

You could do this most efficiently by clamping together a stack of chips, then applying ink with a thick sharpie liberally along the outer "rind".

[Acererak]

Thanks for the suggestion. That is a very interesting idea that I had not considered.