Rated 4.9/5 by our customers since 2021.
The Object of the Beer Game
The aim of the game is to fulfill requests at each stage of the supply chain in order to meet the overall demand of end customers.
Players are assigned to a role in their specific industry. For example, in a beer supply chain simulation, participants play as either Manufacturer, Distributor, Wholesaler, or Retailer.
Each role responds to order requests from the stage below and places orders for the stage above.
→ The resulting game experience provides insights into:
Basic supply chain concepts
Stock, lead time, costs, orders, demand, etc.
The Bullwhip Effect
How small changes in demand can create large swings in orders and inventory.
Effects of human behavior
How collaboration - or lack of - can impact overall performance.
Impact of various supply parameters
Visibility, batches, price fluctuations, etc.
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How to play
How to play the Beer Game
Four roles make up the chain: Retailer, Wholesaler, Distributor and Manufacturer. Each one has a client to ship to and a supplier to order from. Demand travels up the chain; beer travels back down.
Every week, each player does two things:
Receive and ship
Cases arrive from your supplier. Your client’s order comes in, and you ship what you can from stock. Anything you can’t ship becomes a backorder (your client is still waiting for it).
Order
Decide how many cases to order from your supplier, based on your stock, the demand you’ve seen so far, and the deliveries already on their way.
The catch is the delay. An order placed in week 0 doesn’t arrive until week 3 (in the standard settings), so you’re always ordering for demand you can’t see yet.
Both mistakes cost money: holding stock costs $0.50 per case per week, backorders cost $1.00. The aim is to finish with the lowest cumulative cost.
Two rules make this harder than it sounds. You can’t see what your client will order next, and you can’t talk to the other players. All you have is your own history and your judgement. The game runs for an unknown number of weeks, and any empty seat is played by the computer.
Use cases
Adopted across various contexts and occasions
Corporate and Team Events
In-company training session, team-building workshop, project kickoff meeting, onboarding program, strategic planning sessions
Conferences and Public Engagements
Seminars, kickoff meetings, industry networking events, trade shows, and exhibitions
University and Educational Development
University training programs, bootcamps, contests across universities, introductory courses
Consulting and Client Engagement
Sales demo, Kickoff client's presentation, Client-focused workshops, Coaching sessions
Running a session at work or university?
Discover the game in a live 1:1 demo
Learn more and get all your questions answered with one of our gamification expert.
What players discover
The Bullwhip Effect
Play the game and something strange happens: end-consumer demand barely moves, yet by the time the signal reaches the Manufacturer, orders are swinging wildly. That’s the bullwhip effect — a small flick at the handle becomes a large crack at the tip.
It isn’t caused by the customer; it’s caused by the structure. Each player sees only their own client’s orders and waits weeks for deliveries, so when stock runs low, ordering extra feels sensible. The player above reads that inflated order as real demand and does the same — until a two-case change at the shop is a thirty-case swing at the factory.
Nobody plays irrationally — every decision is locally sensible. The oscillation appears anyway, and that’s what makes the lesson stick.
This isn’t a drinking game,
so why is it called the Beer Game?
The name comes from a role-playing game developed at MIT in the 1960s: professors found they could grab students’ attention far more effectively by calling it the Beer Distribution Game.
Our beer games can be white-labelled, so whether you trade in aircraft parts or smartphones, you can customize the game to your specific widget, industry and audience.
History
Where the Beer Game came from
Early 1960s
The game was created at MIT’s Sloan School of Management by Jay Forrester, the engineer who founded the field of system dynamics. He was chasing a question that had little to do with beer: why do industrial systems oscillate even when nobody in them is behaving badly?
The original
It was a board game — a long paper layout, plastic chips for cases of beer, slips for orders, and a facilitator tracking costs by hand. It spread from MIT to universities worldwide, and plenty of classrooms still play it that way.
1989
John Sterman analysed thousands of recorded plays and found the pattern was remarkably consistent: players systematically discount the stock already on order, over-correct, and generate the oscillation almost every time. A year later Peter Senge opened The Fifth Discipline with the game, and it became a standard illustration of systems thinking well beyond supply chain courses.
Today
Sixty years on, the mechanics are unchanged. What’s changed is the setup: what once took an afternoon of chips and record sheets now runs online in minutes, for four players or six hundred.
The Zensimu platform
The easiest way to run the Beer Game
Zensimu turns the classic MIT board game into an online simulation you can set up in a couple of minutes. Run it with the default settings, or tune demand, lead times, costs and dozens of other parameters to fit your own industry.
- From 4 to 600 players, in person or fully remote; empty roles are played by the computer.
- White-label the simulation with your own industry, product and branding.
- Follow every team live from the instructor dashboard as the game unfolds.
- Automatic results, charts and rankings — exportable to PDF or Excel for the debrief.
FAQ