Game Analysis: Enterpriser

Running a business is like playing a game of life. Combining both a game and the style of business would give you “Enterpriser” created from the Economist. Enterpriser is a game to build a business where players would find both challenging and educational to play with. Furthermore, the target audience of this game would be from young adults to adults.

Illustration 1: Enterpriser

I choose this game as Enterpriser simulates business and trading in real life in the form of a board game, where player acts as entrepreneurs striving to be as wealthy as possible. Like a real-life entrepreneur, players would have to achieve as much wealth as possible while facing the problems and opportunities in the business world. With business-like decisions to make such as deciding how and when to invest their money, how much to borrow, how quickly to expand their businesses and when to take advantage of opportunities. Players are tested to their limit on their decision making skills. Furthermore, real life product and services such as Mobil, CITIBANK are included in the game to give a real-life twist to it. An example of these real life products would be Citibank, which allows the player to borrow up to $20,000 regardless of their credit limit.

 

Illustration 2: Company Cards

The rules reflects to the real life situation very well as players start off with the most basic equipment and sum of money to start off their businesses. To earn money for their businesses, players have to travel over the game board to collect orders from customers. In order to manufacture the products for the order requested, three important ingredients are needed other than money: labor, equipment and raw materials. Labor would represent the work force of the company, from unskilled workers to highly trained specialists. Equipment would represent machinery, desks and anything else used directly or indirectly to make a product. Raw materials are the resources needed to make the product such as lumber, oil and water. Having higher quality labor and equipment would allow players to produce higher quality products which would earn more money.

 

Illustration 3: Labor, Equipment, Resources

Furthermore, based on the random roll of the dice while traveling on the game board, players would have to use and adapt to whatever situations they face, which relates to real life where entrepreneurs would have to be flexible enough to response to any situation. To make the game more realistic, economic event cards are used in the game to represent the unforeseen situation players might face. Such examples would be “Recession” where there is a slowdown in economic activity which prevents player from delivering high quality goods to their customers and “Labor Dissatisfaction” where you can buy the lowest Labor Unit from any other players you choose from. The events are usually bad, but it is fun when all the players are affected by it. At the same time, it also shows very well how economic events can affect the well-being of a company.

 

Illustration 4: Events

However some of game mechanics or rules cause the game to fall short. An example of this would be trying to incorporate real life insurance into the game. In the game, Insurance protect the player from most of the negative events just for the price of $5,000 only, making the realistic game into an unrealistic game. Insurance would give players lifetime coverage no matter how bad the event is and would last till a bad event occurs. Thus upon buying an insurance, players would have no worries on what events would befall upon them and blindly take any risks to earn more money, which is not realistic in real life. Thus a solution to this mechanic would be attaching an upkeep cost of $2,500 to it. Like in real life, insurance come with a monthly fee and not paying the fee would void the insurance. Thus by attaching the upkeep cost, players would not be able to abuse the insurance that easily.

 

Illustration 5: Board

 

In the real life, there are unlimited kinds of varieties of labor, equipment and raw materials in the world. However the game simplified them into just three kinds of labor, three kinds of equipment and one kind of raw material for players to acquire, making the game much simpler for the players to understand and manage. If there were too many resources to choose from, the game would be extremely complex and hard to play with. Another shorthanded element in the game would be the time needed to complete the objective of the game. In real life, businesses would take as least more than 10 years to mature and grow in order to earn heaps of money. In the game however, the average game time needed to complete Enterpriser would take around 2-3 hours. Thus greatly reducing the time taken while trying to simulate the growth of a business.

 

The fun aspect of this game would be learning business skills while playing a game. Players would go through the ever changing economic times and unpredictable events of what an entrepreneur would face. Thus player have to make the best decisions to have the best chance of winning. Furthermore, Enterpriser give players the flavor of how a competitive marketplace works, while also teaching them important economic terms and concepts. Like in real-life, there is no sure win method to guarantee victory. However with experience, players would learn when to take risks, when to make use of their cards and other features of the game.

 

In conclusion, Enterpriser can be used as an educational tool to teach young adults to become entrepreneurs. While having fun competing with each other to be the wealthiest of all, business skills and decision making skills are taught in the game so as when the game is over, players would be able to apply what have they learn into real life businesses. Thus benefiting players with knowledge while still having fun.