Student Guide

You run a company. Four AI rivals run theirs. Each round is one business quarter: you make five decisions, then the market decides who sells what.

The goal

Finish with the highest score when the rounds run out. Profit drives the score most — about half of it — but the score also rewards the health of the company behind the profit: your capacity, your efficiency, your marketing and R&D, your share of the market. A company that strip-mines everything for one big quarter will lose to one that earns and builds.

The five levers

Price

What customers pay per unit. Higher price = more money per sale, but fewer buyers choose you. Watch your cost per unit in the Forecast panel — selling below cost means every sale loses money. Classic trap: cutting price to win volume and discovering the volume was never profitable.

Production

How many units to build this round. Your factory has a maximum. Build more than you sell and the extras sit in inventory, where storage fees eat into next round. Build too few and buyers who wanted your product walk away — those sales are lost, not postponed.

Marketing

Ads. More spend pulls more buyers toward you — this round only. It's a faucet, not a reservoir: turn it off and the effect stops.

R&D pays off next round

Improves your product so buyers pay more. Unlike marketing, it builds up round after round — R&D is a reservoir. Spent late in the game, it barely has time to matter; spent early, it compounds.

New capacity arrives next round

A bigger factory. It costs cash now and raises your production limit from next round on. The lag is the lesson: if you wait until you're sold out to expand, you've already lost those sales.

Reading the forecast

The Forecast panel is an estimate, not a promise. It assumes every rival repeats last round's move — and they won't. They cut prices, launch campaigns, and expand factories while you do the same.

That's not a flaw; it's the point. After each round, the results screen shows Forecast vs. what happened. The gap between the two is exactly what your rivals did. Learning to anticipate that gap — "if I cut price, Slasher will cut deeper" — is learning strategy.

Reading your results

The verdict card comes first: your profit, your rank, and up to two plain-language causes (sold out, inventory piling up, priced far from the market).
Forecast vs. what happened shows what you expected against what you got. Red numbers mean reality came in under your plan.
The rivals speak: each AI explains its move. They're telling you their strategy — read them like a poker table.
Standings: rank, each company's price this round, Score, and Total profit. Note they're different columns — you can hold more cash than a rival and still trail on Score if their company is built stronger.

The score, explained

Six ingredients, added together every round:

Ingredient	What it measures
Profit	Money you've kept over the whole game. The biggest ingredient by far — about half the score.
Marketing + R&D	How much demand you're building compared to rivals.
Capacity	How much you could supply compared to rivals.
Efficiency	How close your factory runs to its sweet spot — about 80% busy. Not idle, not redlined.
Market share	Your slice of the units actually sold.
Starting points	Everyone gets these. They keep early scores from looking scary.

The end-of-game screen shows this exact breakdown for you and the winner, side by side — with a verdict naming your biggest gap and what to try next run.

Glossary

Unit cost: What it costs you to make one unit. Sell above it, you earn; sell below it, you pay customers to take your product.
Margin: The gap between your price and your unit cost. Volume without margin is just being busy.
Price elasticity: How strongly buyers react to price. Raise your price and some buyers leave; the question is always how many.
Market share: Your percentage of all units sold this round.
Capacity: The most your factory can build in one round.
Utilization: How much of your capacity you actually used. 80% is the sweet spot — room to flex without paying for idle machines.
Inventory: Units you made but didn't sell. They wait in a warehouse, and the warehouse sends a bill.
R&D: Research and development — money spent making the product itself better, so buyers choose you at higher prices.

Ready? Play a round — 4 rounds, about 5 minutes, no signup.