Management (game)

Management is a business simulation board game designed by Charles S. Roberts, the founder of Avalon Hill, who released it in 1960 and later named it as the design he was proudest of among all his games. Two to four players each run a manufacturing company through repeated business cycles, buying raw materials, setting production volumes, pricing their finished goods and expanding their factories, with the size of a player's company at the end of the game deciding the winner. Its central tension comes from simultaneous secret decisions: players bid blindly against each other for a limited supply of raw materials, then set a selling price without knowing what their rivals will charge, hoping to undercut the competition without leaving money on the table. Although marketed as a family game, Management found a second life in college business courses, where instructors adopted it as a teaching tool for the same pricing and production decisions real manufacturers face.