What it is
Each team runs a computer company. The company needs chips to build machines, and there are two places to buy them: one cheaper, one more dependable, and the difference between them is the whole game. Teams also decide how much to spend on marketing. Then the round closes, the market resolves, and everyone finds out what their decision was worth.
What makes it bite is that the market is not a fixed formula waiting to be solved. It is built as a digital twin from real market data, and it moves in response to what every team does. A supplier choice that was correct in round two can be the wrong one in round five because three competitors crowded into the same supplier. Students are not optimising against a machine; they are competing against each other inside a model that reacts.
On top of that, shocks arrive. They vary in likelihood and in severity, and they are the part students remember: a plan that only works when nothing goes wrong is revealed, quickly and publicly, as not much of a plan.
Why it works in a course
Most business cases are retrospective: the outcome already happened and the student reconstructs the reasoning. Here the outcome has not happened yet, and the student has to commit before knowing. That changes what you can assess. You stop grading whether they got the right answer and start grading whether they can defend a decision made under uncertainty, with the evidence they actually had.
It also makes the abstractions concrete. Supplier concentration, price elasticity, first-mover advantage and the cost of holding inventory stop being terms to memorise once a team has lost a round to each of them.
Rules of play
What a team decides each round
- How many chips to buy.
- Which of the two suppliers to buy them from, and teams may split the order across both.
- How much to spend on marketing.
The two suppliers
The two sources differ on price and on reliability. The cheaper one exposes the company to shortfalls; the dearer one buys certainty. Neither is the correct answer, and which one is better depends on what competitors do and on which shocks land.
How a round resolves
- Every team submits its decisions before the round deadline. Decisions are simultaneous and hidden: nobody sees a rival's order until the round closes.
- Chip orders are filled, subject to each supplier's reliability. A shortfall means the company cannot build everything it planned to.
- Market demand is allocated across the competing companies.
- Any event for the round is applied.
- Results are published to every team, then the next round opens.
Events
Events represent the kind of disruption the real semiconductor market produces: demand swings, supply interruptions, cost shocks. They vary in both likelihood and severity across a game, so a team cannot plan on a quiet run.
Winning
The scoring rule matters pedagogically as well as competitively: a score based on the final round alone rewards a different strategy from one based on the whole run, and students will optimise for whichever you use.
Modes
- Live Game
- Open market, free during the alpha. The quickest way to try the simulation without arranging anything.
- Box Game
- A private market for one cohort, with configurable settings (the mode to use for a graded course).
- E-sport
- Competitive format, used for tournaments including the Futures World Championship at HEC Montréal.
Teaching material
Learning objectives
By the end of a full run, a student should be able to:
- Explain the trade-off between input cost and supply reliability, and say under what conditions each choice is the better one.
- Justify a sourcing decision in terms of the risk it accepts rather than the price it pays.
- Anticipate how rivals' decisions change the value of their own, that is, reason about a market rather than about a firm in isolation.
- Distinguish a bad decision from a good decision with a bad outcome, and argue the difference using the information available at the time.
- Read feedback from one round and revise a strategy without over-fitting to a single result.
- Quantify the cost of a disruption and propose a hedge whose price they can state.
Where it fits
It slots into strategy, operations management, industrial economics, supply-chain management and international-business courses. It needs no accounting background. It works as a single intensive session, as a thread running across several weeks of a term, or as the practical component of a course whose readings and lectures carry the theory.
No prior knowledge of semiconductors is required, and it is worth saying so to students: the industry is the setting, not the subject.
Before the first round
- Have each team write down, in two or three sentences, the strategy they intend to follow and what would make them abandon it. Collect these. They are the single most useful artefact in the debrief.
- Agree how the team will decide when members disagree: majority, a designated decision-maker, or consensus. Teams that have not settled this lose rounds to their own process.
- Set the expectation that results will be public between rounds. Being visibly behind is part of the experience.
Debrief questions for students
These work as discussion prompts between rounds, or as the basis for a written reflection afterwards.
- Which of your decisions would you make again even knowing the outcome? Which would you reverse? Say why the reasoning, not the result, was wrong.
- When did you first realise a competitor's behaviour was affecting you? What did you change?
- What did the cheaper supplier actually cost you, across the whole game, once shortfalls are counted?
- Name a round where you were lucky. What would have happened to the same decision under a worse draw?
- What information did you most want and not have? What would you have paid for it?
- If you played again tomorrow against the same rivals, what is the first thing you would do differently?
Assessment
Grading on final score alone rewards luck and punishes sound reasoning that met a bad draw. A defensible split assesses the reasoning and treats performance as a small component:
- Decision log
- A short record per round: what was decided, on what evidence, what was expected. Written before the result is known.
- Strategy memo
- The opening strategy and its stated abandonment conditions, submitted before round one.
- Final reflection
- What the team got wrong and how they know. Rewards honesty about error.
- Performance
- A minor weight. Enough to keep the competition real, not enough to make the grade a lottery.
For instructors
Instructor material. Published openly for now. Session parameters, scoring keys and solved case answers are not on this site. Write to us from an institutional address and we will send them.
Running a session
The facilitation matters more than the software. The simulation generates the experience; the debrief is where the learning is fixed. Budget real time for it: a run with no debrief is an afternoon of entertainment.
- Brief for less time than feels comfortable. Teams learn the mechanics in one round; a long up-front explanation of rules they have not yet needed does not survive contact with the first decision.
- Between rounds, stop on one concept only. Round two might be supplier risk; round four, competitive response. Trying to draw out everything after every round flattens all of it.
- Publish the standings. The discomfort of visible last place is a large part of why the decisions feel real.
- When a team asks what the right answer is, redirect to what would have to be true for their choice to be right. That question is the course.
- Keep the strategy memos from before round one and return them at the end. The gap between intention and behaviour is usually the sharpest teaching moment available.
What to watch for
- Anchoring on round one
- A team that won the first round often keeps its strategy long past the point where the market has changed. Name the pattern rather than the team.
- Over-fitting
- One bad result triggers a total strategy reversal. Ask what evidence would distinguish noise from a trend.
- Diffused decisions
- A team that averages four members' preferences into a decision none of them would defend. Force a named owner for the round.
- Silent disengagement
- Teams far behind stop deliberating. Give a mid-game reset (a target that is still reachable from last place).
- Hindsight talk
- Students judging past decisions by outcomes. This is the habit the whole exercise exists to break; interrupt it every time.
Not published here
Configuration values, scoring keys, event probabilities and worked case answers are deliberately absent from this public page. Students find these pages too. Request them from an institutional address and we will send them.
Case studies
CASE 01
The cost of the cheaper supplier
Pairs the simulation's two-supplier decision with the 2020–2023 semiconductor shortage, when firms that had optimised sourcing on unit price found they could not build anything at all.
Between 2020 and 2023 the semiconductor supply chain failed in a way that had been described as a tail risk for years. Automakers who had driven input costs down by concentrating orders and holding minimal inventory stopped production lines for want of parts costing a few dollars. Firms that had paid more for redundancy (second sources, buffer stock, long-term contracts) kept building. The premium they had been paying, and which looked like waste on every quarterly report before 2020, turned out to be the price of an option that paid out.
This is the simulation's central decision, played for real. Students who have just lost a round to a supplier shortfall are unusually ready to take the question seriously.
Use it before or after
Before the run, it primes students to notice the trade-off and slightly biases them toward caution: useful if you want them to discover the cost of caution themselves. After the run, it generalises what they just felt into something they can carry into other industries. Running it after tends to produce the better discussion.
Discussion questions
- Before 2020, a procurement officer who paid a premium for a second supplier could not point to any realised benefit. How should that person have justified the cost to a CFO, and what does that tell you about how firms account for resilience?
- Was single-sourcing a mistake, or a reasonable decision that met an unlikely event? Does your answer change if the firm had been warned?
- In your own game, compute what the cheap supplier cost you across all rounds including shortfalls. Was it cheaper?
- Redundancy costs money every period and pays only sometimes. What framework would you use to decide how much to buy? Name what your framework needs that you cannot actually observe.
- Who inside a company is rewarded for cost reduction, and who is blamed for a stoppage? What behaviour does that produce?
Sources and teaching notes for this case are not yet attached.
CASE 02
When everyone crowds the same supplier
A short case on why a decision that is individually rational becomes collectively self-defeating, and how students can spot the pattern from inside it.
In the simulation, the cheaper supplier is the obvious choice, which is precisely why it stops being one. When enough companies route their orders to the same source, that source's constraints become everyone's constraint, and the advantage evaporates for all of them simultaneously. Nobody made an individually foolish decision. The aggregate is still bad.
Students usually arrive at this by losing to it twice. The case gives the pattern a name so it transfers: congestion, crowding, correlated risk. The same structure appears in capacity investment, hiring markets and trading strategies.
Discussion questions
- How could you have detected crowding from the information published between rounds, before it cost you a round?
- If you had known every rival would choose the cheap supplier, what would your best response have been? Now: if they all reasoned that way too, what happens?
- Give an example outside this simulation where the same structure appears. What broke the pattern there, if anything?
- Is there any decision here that is right regardless of what competitors do? What does its existence, or absence, tell you about the market?