Welcome to EGG 21! This issue looks at an area of games that not everyone enjoys. Namely, economic games. The topic sounds dry, but the range of business games is very wide. Rail road games run the gamut from simple (Rail Baron) to the complicated (1829,30,35). One reason why I like games like this is that if the game is simple enough, like Empire Builder, I can get my wife to play them with me. Business games are used widely in universities to train college students in how business decisions are made. These are not the type of games that we hobbyists would play but they are there to be looked at if you want. I read once that the Soviets used business games heavily during the 1920s and 30s, to make decisions with. Unfortunately, I believe most of those simulators got purged by Stalin. Oops, I guess gaming could be a threat to the powers that be. Monopoly is the most common economic games out there. I remember playing 20-hour games with my brothers when I was a kid. The games turned out a lot like the 80s did. I played poorly but I made up for it by embezzling money from the bank when no one was looking, and running up an ungodly debt to my brothers. Now days I hear people talk about playing real long Civilization games, or playing SimCity on the computer. Still that is nothing like being $50,000 in debt in Monopoly money (it was just me and the USA federal government). I would like to hear about other types of economic games you have played, and enjoyed. My guess is that these games could tell us a lot more about how logistics should be run in wargames than reading yet another book on 18th century magazines. I look forward to hearing from you all. Back to Experimental Games Group # 21 Table of Contents Back to Experimental Games Group List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1992 by Chris Engle This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com