Party game: Company War

Here's an interesting party game, suitable for 6 teams and above.

Company War is a party game suited for dinners, team building events, etc. It works best when the participants can be divided into 6 groups or more. The gameplay is simple and comprises several voting rounds, ideally spaced out at intervals.

In each voting round, teams must vote to promote either Product A or Product B (replace these suitably, e.g. with your organization's product vs your competitor's product). Teams that vote for Product A will be awarded $10k (again, replace the currencies suitably), whereas those that vote for Product B will be awarded $40k. The points may be traded with other teams, or even donated to charity. However, there are two additional catches:

1. If more than a quarter (or two, whichever is more) of the teams vote for Product B, the competition in the market becomes tough, and instead of getting $40k they will all lose $20k. Those backing Product A remain unaffected and continue to earn $10k.
2. If all the teams vote for Product A, the market becomes saturated and all teams lose $20k. Additionally, a quarter of the teams with the lowest score at that point loses an additional $20k (making a total of $40k), as smaller companies suffer more loss from the financial storm.

The number of voting rounds is theoretically unlimited, but to stay within time constraints (and avoid participants losing interest) a total of 7 rounds is recommended. The total number of rounds must be announced beforehand. After round 3, if participants have not realized already, remind them that they could behave like real companies and actually trade their points, e.g. to form alliances and conglomerates.

At the end of the exercise, debrief the participants on the importance of forming alliances. In particular, remind them that nowhere in the game was stated that the objective is to be the company with the most number of points! They could have worked together to secure maximum gain on the whole. Reveal scores from other collection of companies (Company War conducted at other events), and let them realize that the world is truly much larger than just the companies they see around them today.