Hey! I'm Mathew and I'm gonna show you how to play the GoVenture Entrepreneur board game. The GoVenture Board Game is a really an experience, a social learning activity more than a traditional board game so the gameplay is quite different than the minigames so it's important to get started and understand the fundamentals and this will make sure you have a successful experience with the game. So this is the game box, we're gonna put that away and we're going to essentially refer to the getting started directions that are included with the game, you can also access these online as well if you need the most important part is to set everything up according to the instructions and then refer to the instructions as you need to, and as you play the game so just to summarize the objective of the game is that you as a player and you can play with anyone from two to six players. You run a business and you want to make the most money in the business there, so the business accumulates the most money or more specifically the most equity product and we use a term called gwidgets, which is a play on the word widgets with a g in front of it. Gwidgets are represented by these chips, and there's blue chips and orange chips. Blue chips represents 500 gwidgets and an orange chip represents 100 and again, you can think of gwidgets as anything. Could be 500 pairs of shoes, and then 100 pairs shoes, or 500 cell phones and 100 cell phones. You want to assign a player to handle the money in the game as a bank, like many other games would do. So any player can do that or all players can do it on their own, it doesn't really matter and what you do is up to you. You set the game up, and provide 2000 gwidgets to each player or remember that each blue one is 500 so normally we would start by giving each player three blue and five oranges. They set the 200 gwidgets down in front of them and then you dole out 25000 dollars to each player. The denominations don't really matter very much, then what we have to do is we have to set up these chips here. I have some purple chips, a green chip, so I'm gonna say I'm the green player, that'll be my chip and you can be the purple chip. Again, different colors for each player and so the premise now is you follow up the instructions and if you look at this part of the game board, it'll tell you to put one color chip on medium quality. There's a quality boxes, low, medium and high. So it says to put it in quality medium, so this is the brand box and in the instructions it tells us to put all the chips on the zero brand, it goes to either one, two, three or zero. For the lifestyle we put zero, which is the busy life style. We put two down for employees and then we get to debt. We start with $25000 in debt, so basically what this means is that we start our business with a $25000 loan, so we've designated that we owe $25000 and remember we started with $25000 in cash so that's where the cash came from. And we have two employees that we've hired to help us run the business. Our personal lifestyle is one that's busy as it is with most people running businesses, as we become more successful we may want an easier lifestyle or we may want to work even harder. We can use this part of the board to designate our lifestyle and then the top part of the board here represents our product, so it has the brand of our product so think of brand like for example, like Nike is a very strong brand and shoes and clothing and a lot of people you know what to own clothing and shoes of the Nike Brand. Nike has spent a lot of money to build their brand, like Apple has spent a lot of time and energy building their brand as well. People have an affinity to that brand, so you build brand and you can win customers. Quality represents the quality of the product, low, medium and high. And of course everyone wants a high quality product but not everybody's willing to pay extra for high quality product and that's something we have to consider. Then we have the price and the instructions tell us we can set our price to whatever we want, so I'm going to set my price to $30 and then you can set your price anywhere you want as well. Let's say you set your price to $220, but you could choose any one of those. For now the implications of price aren't as immediately evident until we start playing the game but generally you know if you think about it in the way in the real world, higher price means you'll make more money, maybe every time you sell gwidgets with a higher price, more money is given to you by your customers. But with that, comes the expectation of a higher quality product or something to come with it. So the last thing we have to do is setup a place for our cards, our challenge cards, and place a pawn.
There's only one pawn you can put it on the starting space right here, and there's also the challenge marker so one of the challenge cards it has the same back but if you flip it over you'll see it says challenge marker, so you give this to one player it doesn't really matter this is just a way of keeping track of how players take certain turns specifically. There are challenge spaces on the board and when our pawn lands on the challenge space one player pulls a card and this will keep track of who pulls a challenge card. I'm gonna hold challenge cards. Mine will be first. We also have a sand timer which we can use to time challenges and we'll see more about that as we play. Alright, so this represents our settings of our product and our lifestyle and our business. This down here is the main game board, this represents a month in business, one calendar month in business and you can see it's actually broken down by week one, week two, week three, and week four. So we would move the pawn along the board like this and then we return. Then we have the spinner that serves a few different purposes you'll notice there's three rings in the spinner, so there's the outside ring that's numbered one to ten and that's used for certain things the middle ring is customers, that represents customers and we'll see that in a moment and then finally the inside ring is whether you win or lose certain things so there's some cards that you would pick from the challenge deck and require you to spin and determine whether you win or lose or other things that could happen to you. So that's when the inside ring is used. SO the rings are only used kind of one at a time depending on what you're actually doing all right so what we do now is once we're all set up and remember just follow the instructions to set everything up and then you can start moving one square at a time as you land on a square refer to the instructions on what to do, and that's essentially once you get through a little bit of the game you'll start to understand what it's all about and then you'll be able to repeat a couple of rounds or a couple months of the other game board. The first time you run it, probably take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes to do the first month until you get a feel for the game and then after that you can probably get through a month in maybe half an hour or so. If you can get through two, three, or four months in a gameplay that's really good. You can stop and then markdown where you are as players and then come back and resume your progress in a game, if you wanted to. So at this point any player, doesn't matter, we could take turns if we want move is the pawn now what's going to move it forward to the first space here, which is rent now. What's important to know about this game is everybody plays every turn so when the player is moved here, if I'm the one moving the pawn I'm essentially moving it for everybody, so unlike many other board games where I would a turn and then finish my turn you would take a turn and finish your turn, that's not how GoVenture Entrepreneur works, and in this game everybody is represented by this one pawn. SO when I move this pawn to this first base which says pay $3000 in rent, we all do that action and so we have to pay $3000 for rent of our building. Everyone pays $3000 to the bank and we move the pawn again, this time we're on customers. So because this pawn works for all the players, everyone gets customers. So, we use the spinner here to identify the psychographics of the customers are that are to purchase right now (on this space) and on the next few weeks. There's four times in a month that we'll be able to sell products to customers, so right now we're here and I will spin this, and if I spin it using this middle ring I can see where it lands. So it landed on a space which says Price $30 or less, so these consumers psychographics or psychographic is basically how a consumer thinks, what is in their mind that they are using to make a decision. So if your product was shoes for example, a customer might decide on purchasing the shoe based on the design of the shoe or the quality of the shoe, or the brand of the shoe, and the price. If you think about any product that a consumer buys, whether it's an automobile or shoes or even a meal they're often determining their decision based on those three things: price, quantity and quality. Any business in the game that's offering $30 or less will win these customers, simple as that. We go to the board over here and look at our price quality an dbrand settings and I'll notice that I'm at $30, and you're at $20, no one is at $40 or $50 but if we had other players in the game they might be at $40 or $50. In this case, both the person who is at $20 and myself win and we split the customers. You'll notice these other colored areas correspond to the colors here. Blue for quality, green for price, and red for brand. If we were to land on brand 3, you'll see the brand here is level 3, and we're level 0. We cannot make a sale here because we aren't a high enough level. Lucky for us it landed on price! We both meet the needs of this customer, so now we have to determine how much we are going to sell. So, we've determined who's going to sell (it's just us) and again, if your price is above the dollar amount here, you cannot sell here. SO I spin and now I'm spinning to try and get the highest number on the outside ring, and I've landed on a 4. And then the other player gets a 2, and 4 is higher than 2 so I come in first place and get to sell first. Whoever finishes in first place sells 1000 widgets, second sells 500, third sells 500. Fourth, fifth, sixth only get 100 widgets so luckily I'm in first place. I take out the 1000 widgets and I only have 1000 remaining. You may be wondering why you shouldn't just pick the higher price, and that's because you can always sell at that higher price. Some customers will always be at a lower price. For example, if we had of landed on $20 that spin, I wouldn’t have been able to sell, if would have only been the other player with $20. There are consequences to every decision, and the customers determine what they're to buy so that's is how the customer space works. Each customer space work exactly the same way. There's a couple neat things you're gonna find as you play so as we continue and start selling, like when you run out. When you run out of your widgets and land on a space that you could sell at if you had any product and you don't, anyone else who qualifies gets to buy more than they usually would. I can try and buy widgets from the people who might have extra leftover at the end of the month, since widgets expire at the end of the month. I can try and negotiate with players to buy their widgets, trying to strike a deal with cheaper prices so that I can sell them at $30, so I try and buy them for $10 or $20 but the other player doesn't have to agree. I can point out that they might have extras leftover and have to throw them out at the end of the month. People can jump in and offer theirs for a better price and then you have some interesting negotiation going on. Let's move onto the challenge spaces. A challenge is where one player picks up a challenge card, usually moving clockwise through the group as the spaces are landed on, and reads the challenge out to everyone because everyone participates. The instructions list that you should have some paper and a pen for the players because some of the challenges require people to write things down. So I'm gonna pull this card and keep it private because everyone has some questions they have to answer. So everyone puts money in the challenge pot, usually $1000 per player. The bank matches whatever is put in, so if there was $2000 in the pot from the players, the bank would match the $2000 and make the total in the challenge pot $4000.
The card requires players to write down the right word for the definition, and whoever gets the definition right would get the money, or a portion of the money split equally between the players who also got it right. If some get it right and one doesn't, the person who didn't get it right wouldn't win anything. However, if no one gets it correct, the money stays in the pot for the next challenge.
The next space is the investing space, and what it says is you can pay $5000 to invest in marketing or advertising which will build your brand. If you want to build your brand you can spend $5000 to move up to level one, $10000 to level two and $15000 for level three. Why would I want to spend that money? Because I'm not paying real cash money, to move up my brand because there are some customers who will only buy from. A business with high brand equity so by investing this money, I'm taking a chance that I'll be able to win more customers, but just like in the real world: in business there are no guarantees. I might have messed that money and the spinner may never land n a customer who's concerned about brand and the investment may not be as effective as I was hoping it would be. Next is employee payroll, so what we do is again, follow the instructions but we can see here that we have two employees and our payroll is $2000 so we would pay $2000 to the bank. Eventually we'll be able to increase or decrease the number of employees we have, and as we increase the number of employees our cost goes up, our payroll goes up but there are some benefits as well. We can win money based on our quality, so you know having a good quality product with good features and it's reliable and os on will make happy customers. Happy customers will tell other customers about how satisfied they are and they'll buy again and they'll encourage more customers to buy so what this does is it rewards players by having higher quality and what you do is spin the spinner and whatever it lands on we multiply it by the amount of times shown here and if I had high quality goods I would get 2x$1000. If you have high quality you can end up rolling up to 10x and winning $10k. There's also the bank loan you have to pay every month, for $3000. The total loan is $25k and $3000 is the interest. If you have enough money, you can pay the loan off fully.
Now we're at employee management. This is when you're allowed the opportunity to increase or decrease the number of employees that you have. Again, if you lose employees, your payroll goes down. Be careful though, there are some challenge cards that require you to have a certain amount of employees to succeed.
Next step is taxes. So each individual player does their own spin, and then they multiply whatever they land on they multiply whatever they land on by 5 x 200 so I pay a thousand dollars in taxes.
widNow we'll talk about the success sheet that comes with the boardgame. You can go to the website and download more, or you can photocopy this and basically every business records all transactions on here, like cash and widgets any loan payments/loan remaining. What this paperwork does is show a basic balance sheet, a great way to start someone's business education. This shows a fundamental concept of running a business. This conce[t is understanding the equity of the business, which will be represented on a balance sheet which is assets minus liability. So it's a simple balance sheet essentially and a great way to introduce balance sheets into the game play, especially if it's part of the learning you want to do/accomplish. The next step we have is to buy widgets, and they are $5 dollars for each, so 100 widgets are we would have to pay $500. So for 500 widgets you'd need to pay $2500 but we're limited to how many widgets we can buy on the number of supply divided by the number of players, so everyone can have their own share. I buy 1400 worth even though I sold 2000 in the last round, so it isn't enough but I might end up buying more from players, or saving these to sell to other players in case they run out.
So that's again, some of the risks you have to take when running a business. Managing your inventory and forecasting how many you think you can sell, so it's a really interesting part of gameplay. Once you have your widgets on hand you can invest in quality, so we can invest $10k to move our widgets up in quality if we wanted to, and again remember there are some consumers that only want to buy higher quality product so you might want to look at the psychographics here and make a decision. The last thing we do at the end of the month, is set the price for the next coming month. Everything is color coded, so price matches, price inventory, match inventory, etc. You'll also notice outlines here, customer loyalty, their quality matches, customer loyalty. And purple is employee management.
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So everything is color-coded to make it a little bit easier to follow so we set our price and you can adjust a price wherever you want, doesn't cost anything you can just set your price and you know hopefully you're making a good strategic decision. Once all that stuff is finished, you go back to the start and run the month again. You can play as many of these months, even a calendar year if you felt like it. Included with the game there's an opportunity to learn accounting with this board game, so there's another sheet similar to the first one, but it's a general ledger and a general journal and you can print all these worksheets for every player and while they're running their business for example, you can have them record it here and they get to practice double-entry accounting like real world accounting. It's all optional though, you could just play for fun!
It's all part of the experience! If you need additional materials or resources, visit GoVenture.net and we hope you have a really great and successful experience playing the board game!
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