Board Games
Physical Business Simulations to help drive awareness of financial principles
Boardgames are physical, limited-scope exercises that utilize a gameboard and moveable gamepieces. The tool can be very powerful in “spotlighting” the inner workings of specific financial transactions and concepts to help drive an understanding of the impacts that business decisions have on the financial statements. These highly interactive exercises immerse users, who are often unfamiliar with finance, into the details of financial transactions and helps bring the financial statements to life. Users can’t just nod their heads in agreement with a particular financial topic – they have to actually move gamepieces across the statements and prove that they really understand the concepts.
Finance boardgames are typically run as live, team exercises within a broader business class, such as after a finance lecture. The exercises played out on the gameboard demonstrate the flow of money through a specific scenario; for example, the sale of a product, the financial impact of Working Capital, or the purchase and depreciation of a piece of equipment. Teams move poker chips representing money to the appropriate location on a ~2’x3’ gameboard that represents an Income Statement and a Balance Sheet. PriSim has developed board games for several industries including insurance, aerospace and defense, manufacturing, and heavy-equipment dealerships.
Physical board game exercises can be a valuable complement to a business simulation exercise. Through well-crafted scenarios that isolate important and relevant business transactions, participants can see step-by-step how the financial statements are interconnected and how money flows through them – and ultimately impacts business results.