Four people, four links in a supply chain, and nobody can see what the others are doing.
One of you is the retailer, one the wholesaler, one the distributor, one the factory. Every round is a week. You look at your stock, you look at what was ordered from you, and you decide what to order from the person upstream.
That is the whole game. It takes ten to twenty minutes and it goes wrong every single time.
It is meant to go wrong
A small wobble in customer demand becomes a bigger swing at the wholesaler, a bigger one again at the distributor, and by the time it reaches the factory somebody is building twenty times what anyone needed.
Then it reverses and everybody is sitting on stock they cannot shift.
Nobody in the chain did anything stupid. Every decision was sensible with the information that person had. That is the bullwhip effect, and watching a room discover it in fifteen minutes is worth more than explaining it in an hour.
This is the MIT one
The Beer Distribution Game came out of MIT Sloan in the early 1960s and has been taught in operations and supply chain courses ever since. This is that exercise, run on phones, finished inside a coffee break.
Up to eight teams at once
Teams of four, up to eight teams, so about thirty-two people. The teams compete, which turns a classroom exercise into something with a scoreboard and an argument at the end.
Who it is for
Operations, logistics and procurement teams. Supply chain and business courses. Onboarding for anyone who will spend their working life somewhere in a chain like this one.
It also does the job for a leadership session about local decisions and system-wide consequences, which is the same lesson wearing a different hat.
What it is not
A party game. Nothing about this is light, and a room that came for entertainment will not enjoy being shown that they made a mess of it.
It also does not work without somebody to run the conversation afterwards. The fifteen minutes creates the problem. The ten minutes after it is where the learning happens, and that part is yours.