Group Game Debrief: "Snowblowers + Lawnmowers"

At my day job, I teach employment skills and trade-specific orientation. This particular cohort focused on port-related industries, material handling, and logistics. I developed a game for the classroom that dealt with the concepts of wave-planning (the changing of demand for a good over time and/or seasonal demand patterns), supply & demand/market forces, and secret bidding. To focus on different commodities but still keep it simple, I decided to choose snowblowers and lawnmowers.

This exercise was modified from "Middleman," which I first saw in Eric Solomon's excellent pencil-and-paper compilation Games With Pencil and Paper. The core was a fantastic starting point, and was inspirational to the point of me winning over fellow staff and then later clients on using it as an education tool for the above topics.

For those not familiar with the game (and I admit I wasn't until I had seen it in this book, maybe a month ago), players represent merchants of a given commodity trying their best to "buy low and sell high." There are other details that streamline the process of bidding based on numbers the players choose at the outset of the game, but I opted to remove that step and instead while acting as moderator I revealed those numbers at each phase of a new round. We played 12 rounds of the game, starting in January and ending in December ( and when it came to customer demand, attempted to depict something close to a northern-hemisphere, subtropical climate).

They choose how much to bid when buying their stock, then they set their selling price and quantity they want to sell. These secret bids are submitted to the moderator (me), and I sell to the highest bid first when providing the supply, and purchase from the lowest bids when buying.

As moderator, I set minimum buying price and maximum selling price to keep things reined-in. I also expanded from a single commodity to two, each with distinctive/seasonal patterns of demand so that the teams could reasonably predict when demand would be up for a given commodity. For example, in the peak of the winter, there would be much more demand for a snowblower, and nearly no one would want to purchase a lawnmower. Of course, in the peak of the summer, the reverse would be true. I also provided some clues with setting the numbers for production. More snowblowers are available in the autumn than in the spring, for example.

In addition to the basic buy-sell mechanic via secret bids, I added a few other wrinkles that made the process interesting and interactive. A couple observations follow.

• Having two commodities, both obviously linked to a seasonal demand cycle, kept the core concepts I wanted to teach within reach of all the clients.
• Adjusting the supply and demand numbers myself allowed clients to focus on their own bankroll, as well as attempting to predict what the other teams would do, with a minimum of analysis paralysis. I also did not provide the demand numbers until after all purchasing was done, so players focused only on a single phase at a time. Since no one had advance information, this wasn't a significant issue or point of contention at any stage.
• I created a "marketing campaign" that allowed teams to win ties. So instead of splitting available stock between teams that presented the same secret bid, the team that invested in the marketing campaign would receive sales at that price point before their competitors.
• There was a significant "runaway leader" issue in this game (I suppose, much like in real markets?). Also, teams left in the dust would continue to lose since they would be consistently outbid by their competitors who had more resources. Some of this could be attributed to players' poor decisions, but as it turned out the only way I could keep one of the four teams in the game was to provide "subsidies" and "promotional discounts" of free stock. No one seemed to mind, and after a while they regained their competitive edge.

I'll write more about this later, but suffice to say it was largely a positive experience for all involved (though at times bookeeping was a bit hectic for me... The game can't be blamed for that, though!)