A turn-based business simulation your students can run on Chromebooks, in the browser, with no accounts. Each round they set price, production, marketing, R&D, and capacity — then the market decides, and four AI rival companies explain the moves they made.
What's live right now is the single-player demo: one student against four AI companies with distinct strategies, playable end to end in about five minutes. The rival explanations in the demo are scripted from real game data.
The classroom version adds what a class needs: in open beta join-code multiplayer where student teams compete in the same market, in open beta an AI coach that asks each student questions without playing for them, in open beta an automatic teacher debrief written after the bell, and in open beta live AI rivals whose every explanation is checked against what actually happened in the market.
To get classroom access: join the beta from the homepage — we'll send you your classroom entry link. Wide release comes in 2027; the beta is how you run it this semester.
Beta teachers get a console link by email after joining the classroom beta. A class session works like this:
You pick the economy when you create a session. Both tiers run the same rules, the same five decisions and the same AI rivals — what changes is how hard a mistake hits. Students never see which tier they are on, and you can run the other one next game with the same join flow.
| Tier | What changes | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Gentle default |
Wider margin on every unit, a price floor near the cost line, and softer penalties for debt and unsold stock. A team can misprice a round and still be in the game. | A first game, a mixed-ability class, or any period where the point is to learn the five levers rather than to survive the market. |
| Standard | Thin margins and a floor far below cost — selling under cost is possible, and a price war genuinely destroys value for everyone who joins it. | A second game, an economics class ready for the hard version, or when the lesson is that competition can leave every firm worse off. |
Why this exists. We ran hundreds of simulated classes with deliberately weak players. On Standard, teams that underprice each other drag the whole market into losses — which is economically correct and pedagogically brutal for a first exposure: half the class watches its company bleed before anyone has understood why. Gentle keeps the same cause-and-effect (undercut the market and your margin still shrinks) without the collective wipe-out, so the debrief is about decisions rather than damage.
Teaching the price war. If price competition is your learning objective, run Standard — it is where the lesson bites hardest, and the auto-debrief will name who started the war and who followed. A good sequence is Gentle first to learn the controls, Standard second with the same class, then compare the two debriefs.
Choose Class format: Multi-day unit when you create the session and one game spans several lessons instead of one period. What changes:
Even with the single-player demo, a whole class can play the same game: every game has a seed number, shown on the final screen. Same seed, same world — so thirty students facing seed 29230512 face the identical market, and their results are directly comparable.
Have students screenshot or write down their final rank, total profit, and the "biggest gap" verdict from the end screen. Then work the questions below.
| In the game | Curriculum topic |
|---|---|
| Price vs. buyers lost | Price elasticity of demand; competition |
| Unit cost, margin, break-even | Unit economics; profit & loss |
| Production vs. inventory vs. lost sales | Supply decisions; carrying costs; opportunity cost |
| Marketing (this round) vs. R&D (compounding) | Short-run vs. long-run investment; differentiation |
| Capacity lag | Capital investment; planning under uncertainty |
| Forecast vs. actual | Expectations, forecasting error, strategic interaction |
| Score = profit + company health | Stakeholder metrics beyond the bottom line |
These map naturally onto standard personal finance / economics / entrepreneurship units (NGPF- and CEE-style course outlines). It's a simulation, not a textbook — it earns the vocabulary lesson by making students need the words.
Yes. Browser-only, no installation, small download, works on locked-down devices.
No. Nothing to sign up for. A game is one anonymous browser session.
No accounts, no tracking pixels, no analytics scripts, no ads. Game decisions go to our server to run the simulation and are tied to nothing but an anonymous session id. Student data is not for sale — there is none to sell.
Nothing, permanently, for teachers and students. Informatist is founder-funded and run as a nonprofit project; the free classroom program is the product, not a trial.
Send your IT department the one-page allowlist request — domains, ports, and the student-data posture, written for them.
Informatist has run browser-based economic simulations since November 11, 2006. The classroom edition is its third act.
Ready to run it with a whole class? Join the classroom beta — we'll send your access, and you get a say in what gets built first.