4 Board Games that Sharpen Your Business Skills

Everyone needs a break. There’s nothing better after a long day’s hard work than coming home and gathering in the living room with a group of friends to play an intriguing and stimulating board game. If that board game helps to sharpen your business skills for tomorrow’s work without slapping you in the face with either work or education, even better. A good business board game is most of all fun. It should also hone your negotiation skills, sharpen your strategic abilities, and fine tune your raw business sense. Here are four board games that sharpen your business skills.

Million Dollar Challenge
There two levels to this game, basic and intermediate. If you are new to the world of business and trade, the basic level will give you a fine initiation, and if you have already garnered a certain amount of experience, you will be intrigued and challenged by the intermediate level.

The Million Dollar Challenge is a market simulator that puts the fun into mutual index fund. The goal is to make a million dollars and the method is buying and selling commodities, stocks, and indexes at the right time and in the right amount. This game is one of the best in the business for priming real life market and trading skills and techniques. It teaches actual market vocabulary and concepts and will help you to get a feel for when to enter a market and when to exit it. The Million Dollar Challenge is like the actual market but without the risk of homelessness.

 Cashflow 101
This game is divided into two sides, a rat race and an ownership class. The rat race is a never-ending cycle of minimum earnings and maximum debt, and the ownership class, on the other side, is where the real money is made. Cashflow 101 will teach you how to make it out of the rat race and into the zone where the cash can really start to flow. Every player begins with a job, a certain amount of income, and plenty of debt, and each has to fight his way to investment opportunities and through crushing setbacks to the golden age of wealth.

Monopoly
No business board game list would be complete without the original board game for classic capitalists. Monopoly begins with a land rush where each player tries to devour as many properties as he can land on by random chance. Random chance, however, will usually only take you so far, and you will probably have to use your powers of negotiation and finagling to win monopolies where you can then build houses and hotels and bankrupt other players.

Steam: Rails to Riches
Although this game is built around railroads, the business skills it teaches can easily be applied to many other forms of modern enterprise. Besides building and maintaining a thriving railroad company, Steam also encourages players to improve the towns in their jurisdiction, figure out the most efficient railroad route depending on the terrain given you, and decide which goods will make you the most profit.

George Stanzan is a freelance writer from Alberta, Canada. His Lethbridge auto insurance rates have lowered in the past year thanks to his broker he found from http://getinsurancequotes.ca.