Starting out with the Thought of Building an Entrepreneurship Card Game!
I’ve always believed in the power of luck and manifestation. Looking back, I can see how every small thing I’ve done out of interest has come together to make sense. If you had asked me in 10th grade if I would ever design a card game, I would have said no. But fast forward to today, and I’m grateful for the journey that led me to where I am. In this and upcoming posts, I’ll share with you the story of how Startup High came about.
Ever since I was a kid, I have loved playing strategic computer games like Age of Empires II, Zoo Tycoon II, and Caesar and board games like Scotland Yard, Monopoly and the like. I think these games have shaped me quite to the extent with respect to strategic decision-making and thorough thinking. Even though the learning curve on these things is never ending, the fact that these things exist and are always in the back of my mind helps a lot.
While these have been ingrained as a part of me, it was only a frustrating day at work when I realised that everyone has not had the same exposure. More importantly, by asking repetitive whys, I could flesh the incident down to something as simple as a board game that the majority of us have played only during our childhood.
Over the next course of days, I started going regularly to a cafe called Unlocked, a board gaming cafe in Gurgaon to just explore and play more board games to validate the hypothesis. Every new board game I played, I was able to pinpoint and tell at least 3 meaningful lifelong learning takeaways. Moreover, the fellow board gamers I met opined the same.
Post that, it was not a very tough derivation for me. Being highly interested and passionate about entrepreneurship, and wishing to strengthen an aspect of thinking in people, I thought of creating an entrepreneurship card game that would not only strengthen a particular way of thinking but also break the existing barriers between people and entrepreneurship.
The making of a game also intrigued me. Working around probabilities, scenarios and boundary constraints is something I wished to challenge myself on. It would be a good challenging side project I thought.
The first constraint I put on myself was to create a card game and not a board game. While there is no hard and fast distinction between the two, a card game is essentially a game with the majority of the game being played through cards. This was done because if the game was being themed on entrepreneurship, and the aim of the game was to break barriers between people and entrepreneurship, it has to be travel friendly and easy for people to play.
I thought of keeping the name of the game as ‘The Entrepreneurship Card Game’. Or ECG for short. Since I knew this name would have its own challenges, my focus was initially on building up the product first.
For the product, my vision was simple: design a simple, fun, startup-themed card game that would spark insightful conversations about entrepreneurship and make people curious about the same.
Since this idea came to me in 2022, the first thought of creating a game based on the Indian startup ecosystem was on startup funding and investments.
While these have been ingrained as a part of me, it was only a frustrating day at work when I realised that everyone has not had the same exposure. More importantly, by asking repetitive whys, I could flesh the incident down to something as simple as a board game that the majority of us have played only during our childhood.
Over the next course of days, I started going regularly to a cafe called Unlocked, a board gaming cafe in Gurgaon to just explore and play more board games to validate the hypothesis. Every new board game I played, I was able to pinpoint and tell at least 3 meaningful lifelong learning takeaways. Moreover, the fellow board gamers I met opined the same.
Post that, it was not a very tough derivation for me. Being highly interested and passionate about entrepreneurship, and wishing to strengthen an aspect of thinking in people, I thought of creating an entrepreneurship card game that would not only strengthen a particular way of thinking but also break the existing barriers between people and entrepreneurship.
The making of a game also intrigued me. Working around probabilities, scenarios and boundary constraints is something I wished to challenge myself on. It would be a good challenging side project I thought.
The first constraint I put on myself was to create a card game and not a board game. While there is no hard and fast distinction between the two, a card game is essentially a game with the majority of the game being played through cards. This was done because if the game was being themed on entrepreneurship, and the aim of the game was to break barriers between people and entrepreneurship, it has to be travel friendly and easy for people to play.
I thought of keeping the name of the game as ‘The Entrepreneurship Card Game’. Or ECG for short. Since I knew this name would have its own challenges, my focus was initially on building up the product first.
For the product, my vision was simple: design a simple, fun, startup-themed card game that would spark insightful conversations about entrepreneurship and make people curious about the same.
Since this idea came to me in 2022, the first thought of creating a game based on the Indian startup ecosystem was on startup funding and investments.
The objective of this version of the game was to raise the right amount of funds as per your startup’s valuation. Your startup’s valuation would get affected by the work the founder undertakes in different departments.
Every founder in the game could plan and work towards different departments like marketing, research and development, sales, operations and technology. In each department, the founder had the option to either just exist, survive or get success. There were further rules with respect to existence, survival and success and a limit on what all combinations could be used by the founder.
With each option undertaken, the company’s valuation would get affected. This would then either raise or bring down the number of funds the founder has to raise. The first founder to match their valuation with the funding amount wins the game!
Every founder in the game could plan and work towards different departments like marketing, research and development, sales, operations and technology. In each department, the founder had the option to either just exist, survive or get success. There were further rules with respect to existence, survival and success and a limit on what all combinations could be used by the founder.
With each option undertaken, the company’s valuation would get affected. This would then either raise or bring down the number of funds the founder has to raise. The first founder to match their valuation with the funding amount wins the game!
While this was a promising theme and start, this wasn’t the version of the game I wanted to work on. Primarily because of two reasons;
- The theme of the game was not justified. While startups and funding are extremely co-related, I thought about how funding is extremely periodic and how it cannot be a layman’s touchstone to the startup ecosystem. There are more real, basic and important elements of the ecosystem from which an aspiring entrepreneur or a layman should seek inspiration from. While the funding rounds grab the highest attention, funded founders know that it is not the end, but rather just the start.
- The mechanics of the game were raw. In hindsight, this could have very easily been corrected by extensive playtesting, however, the usual card drafting and management of resources were not making sense to me.
To progress further, I carried the elements I found interesting to the second version of the game, ECG 2.0, which I would be discussing in the next article.