Games are an excellent way to teach important concepts to kids all while having fun through innovated educational games. The last few weeks we have spent a lot of time at home playing The Entrepreneur Game by EESpeaks.

The game is created by Elliott Eddie who is a successful entrepreneur with over five successful businesses of his own. As a public speaker and entrepreneur, he wanted to give back to the forgotten and under privileged communities and give them the knowledge and skills he has learned as an entrepreneur. The game also falls under the STEM criteria skill set.

The Entrepreneur Game is for ages twelve and up. The game can be played with two players all the way up to six players. The basis of the game is that you are an entrepreneur and must play smart to be successful despite some real-life sceneries that may occur while owning a business. The skills taught in the game are budgeting, marketing, decision-making, investing, negotiating, branding, and communications.

The game comes with a game board, six plastic game pieces, 2 die-six sided, pencils, marketing card deck, wild card deck, losses’ card deck, Trump card deck, pre-printed writing pad, paper money, and an instruction guide. The average game play is around an hour.

To play the game you place your four unique card decks and put them in the proper space on the game board. One player is the Banker and will distribute and receive money as needed.

Each player will receive a game play paper from the writing pad. On your writing pad you will keep track of your loan amount, what you pay off, what you accrue with expenses, if you retained a lawyer, and a place for notes. The player must decide if they want to have a home-based business that you will run out of your home or a brick and mortar business in a store front. Whichever option you choose for your business you must choose business name and plan in which you share your vision with the other players. A home-based business you cannot get a loan from the bank and will have to use $10,000 cash of your own money to start it up. A brick and mortar business cost $50,000 which you can take out a full loan from the bank. Depending on which option you choose to play will determine the path that you take on the game board.

At the beginning of each play the player has to decide if you want to retain a lawyer if you have not done so on a previous play or if you used the lawyer on your previous turn. Other decisions that you have to decide on is if you want to put money into your market account, invest into another player’s business, or talk to another player into investing into your business, pay off your business loan, or start up another business, and lastly be creative and come up with your own strategy to succeed as an entrepreneur. You can think outside of the box with your business and take chances with other players.

You can create other business once you pay off your loan of your current business. Each business you can decide if you want it to be a home-based business or a brick and mortar one. You can accumulate up to six businesses during the game. Throughout the play you can borrow money on your property, sell your business, make deals with other players, have a joint business with another player, and do an investment when you land on certain spaces or get cards throughout the game.

Throughout the board you have paydays and colored coded spaces that indicate which of the four card decks you draw from on your turn.

Wild Cards: -Yellow: can be a good card or a bad one. A few scenarios: The mayor honors your business for your businesses involvement in your community which increases your brand or an unsatisfied customer smears your business on social media and you lose half your money on your next payday.

Marketing Cards-Green: you can only play on this space if you have set aside money in your marketing budget. This card can be interactive: one card has you draw a picture of your social media ad in sixty-seconds and you receive to profit. If you leave any vital details out of the ad you lose all your marketing money. Another card says your ad contains false claims and results in a government investigation.

Losses-Red: part of owning a business is losses that are out of your hands. Can you overcome and adjust your business? Scenarios are you are sued by a client and you must decide to settle out of court for $15,000 or take a chance by rolling the die to determine your payout. Another situation is that an employee embezzles money and you must roll the die and multiply it by a certain amount. If you retained a lawyer there is also a fee.

Trump- Orange: this is a big business card that you can trump big with some huge effects to you and the other players. One card says you choose a player and do a hostile takeover of their business. You buy their business, pay off their loan, sell its assets, and run up its credit and file bankruptcy. You receive their profits. Another card is that you discover damaging information on another player and you can offer them a choice to give you 50% ownership in one of their businesses or they roll the die and pay you a percentage of the roll.

To win the game all players must get to the finish line. Each player adds up their assets. The winner is the one with the most assets is the winner.

As a family we played this game many times and even had a few opportunities to play the game with friends. There are a lot of useful skills to learn within this board game. I personally saw an opportunity to take the skills outside of the board game with my fourteen-year-old son and my seventeen-year-old daughter.

My daughter runs her own business with products she sells from her beehives. She is stuck on her routine and comfort zone due to her special needs. She is always hesitant to take chances. She worked on her negotiation skills while playing the board game. She always had her business focused on beehives and similar business during the game. She was able to practice those skills on her family. She approached a business that has carried her product in their store for several years. The product is a good seller for them. Since she knew that it was a popular item in the store, she was able to up her profit there as she negotiated a new contract. She is currently thinking of doing a bit of marketing of her products in the future.

My son is an extremely competitive and aggressive player. He likes to take chances and it paid off for him several times during the game. He also lost big several times. I had him brainstorm after each game to see what strategies worked for him despite getting a few setbacks in the game. When he did not win, he had to decide was it the cards that he drew during the game that caused his business to not flourish or fail. Or was it his decisions that he made that affected the game outcome. He had several games that were a result of both outcomes.

There were a few things that we were not crazy about. The game did not have enough money to play a game when you had four to six players. The instruction guide does address this problem and tells you that the bank can issue I.O.U.’s.

The game is set up for you to be creative and we liked that option but at the same time the marketing and investing in the stock were very vague and we felt that the game did not provide enough opportunities to do it on the board. For the investing in the instructions it says you can invest in stocks, precious and semi-precious stones, bonds, Bitcoin, and other currency. During the game we rarely landed on investing or marketing space on the board. When you did land on it the spaces for investing it felt a bit vague. We would put aside money for marketing and investing but we did not land on those spots often. The game is also flexible enough for you to create some house rules. Our house rule was that at the beginning of the players turn you had to declare if they wanted to invest in and what they invested in. We would roll the die to determine the outcome of the investment. We did the same concept with the marketing. Some of the cards were overly broad but I think that was the creator’s intention for you to think it out and be creative. Despite those oddities in the game this is a fun and well thought out game. There is a lot of options to make the game suitable for your family dynamics. We really liked The Entrepreneur Game by EESpeaks a lot and plan to continue to play it.

Your kids may not plan to run their own business but there are several skills that they need to be successful in everyday life. Buying a car at a dealership requires some skill of being able to negotiate buying a car. When they have careers, they will need to be able to negotiate a pay raise in a job or during the hiring process. We all must learn how to budget and make decision. Some of our kids will be investing, negotiating, branding, and using communications in everyday life. Playing a game is a fantastic way to get your kids thinking and learning about some vital life skills.

-Product review by Renee Knoblauch, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, July 2020