Meet the Animated Pawns
Until now, your piece on the Moneyflow board was an icon: a top hat, a briefcase, a rocket. Nice, but flat. This week the store gains ten pawns that actually move. A giraffe that sways, a polar bear that shuffles, an alien that will not stop bobbing. Here they all are, live, and a look at how they work.
The full lineup
The animations below are the exact files the game uses. If your browser prefers reduced motion, they show as stills.
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Giraffe
Tallest piece on the board by a long neck. Sees the Payday square coming from three spaces away.
$1.99 -
Polar Bear
Calm, unhurried, and very hard to knock off course. The pawn for long-term investors.
$1.99 -
Alien
Landed in the middle of the stock market and has not understood it yet. Neither have we.
$1.99 -
Dragon
Sits on a pile of assets and breathes fire at anyone who mentions the debt-to-income ratio.
$1.99 -
Shark
Never stops moving. Circles the Business squares and buys low without apologising.
$1.99 -
Tiger
All momentum. Rolls doubles more often, or at least it feels that way.
$1.99 -
Rocket Man
The upgrade to our classic Rocket icon. Same ambition, now with a jetpack and a helmet.
$1.99 -
Dancing Bear
Celebrates every Payday like it is the first one. Pairs well with a winning streak.
$1.99 -
Zombie
Has been bankrupt before and kept going. Living proof that you can come back from anything.
$1.99 -
Spider
Builds a web of passive income one square at a time. Patient, and a little unsettling.
$1.99
How to get them
Open the Store from the main menu, pick a pawn, and it is yours. On the web you pay by card through Stripe Checkout; on Android the purchase goes through Google Play. Either way the pawn is tied to your Moneyflow account rather than to a device, so a pawn bought in the browser shows up on your phone and the other way round.
Prefer something simpler? The classic icon pawns are still there.
Gold Briefcase, Rocket, Bitcoin, Lambo, Yacht, Crown, Diamond and the Golden Top Hat are $0.79 each, or five of them together in the 5-Pawn Bundle for $2.99. And the original Top Hat remains free for everyone.
How they are made
Every animated pawn is a Lottie file: a vector animation described in JSON and drawn on the board as SVG at whatever size the board needs. That matters on a grid where the pieces are small. A video or a sprite sheet would go soft the moment you zoom in; these stay crisp on a phone and on a 4K monitor alike, and the whole set of ten weighs about as much as a couple of photos.
The pawns also know which way they are facing. When your piece moves clockwise around the board, the game flips the animation so the Shark or the Tiger is running in the direction of travel rather than moon-walking backwards. Symmetric pieces like the Spider, the Giraffe and both bears opt out of the flip, because a mirrored giraffe is still a giraffe.
One detail we spent more time on than expected: the pawn has to remain readable as a game piece. An animation that looks great at full size can turn into a shimmering blob at 40 pixels. Each of the ten went through a round of "does this still read from across the room" before it made the cut, and a few candidates did not.
Play it now
Moneyflow is free to play in any browser at playmoneyflow.com, and free on Android. Pick a character with real income, expenses and debt, then build enough passive income to escape the 9-to-5. The giraffe is optional, but recommended.