Scarcity, opportunity cost, and gains from trade — the foundation both AP Econ courses open with. These two games are shared with AP Micro Unit 1.
A dice game about the cost you don't see. Every round you place one die: take the sure points, park it in Long Term to multiply later, or burn the round on Spite. Parking a die costs you more than a round — it costs you the right to choose.
Work out absolute advantage, opportunity cost, and comparative advantage from plant data — then decide whether the proposed terms are worth signing.
GDP, unemployment, and inflation — how economists read the health of an economy from raw data.
Read the headlines, predict inflation, then split your coins across savings, bonds, stocks, and loans. Watch purchasing power quietly erode — or hold.
Roll an economic event, then slide six dials: GDP, consumer spending, investment, government spending, exports, and imports. Most of the table are Economists. Some are Slyders, steering the board wrong on purpose — and nobody sees the answer until the round ends.
Same game, the labor market. Slide GDP, the unemployment rate, labor force participation, and the three types of unemployment. Telling cyclical from frictional from structural is where the lying gets easy.
Shift the curves, run the multiplier math, and watch policy ripple through the AD/AS model.
Read the event, then call it: does AD, SRAS, or LRAS shift left, right, or not at all? Fast rounds, instant feedback.
Walk the five-link chain of classical self-correction — output gap to labor market to wages to costs to SRAS — then run it: diagnose the shock, pull the lever, tune wages against the clock.
You're a Fed intern. Each briefing hides a different multiplier — spending, tax, money, or balanced budget. Pick it, compute it, call the direction.
You're a CBO intern. Pull the GDP and labor data, compute the deflator and cyclical unemployment, then call the stabilizers. Round 5 is the stagflation trap.
The same shift call, played against three other people. Slide aggregate demand, short-run and long-run supply, the price level, output, and unemployment. Plenty of unrelated events push AD the same way, which is exactly what makes a Slyder hard to catch.
Control the money supply, move interest rates, and try to stabilize an economy that fights back.
Set the federal funds rate, run open market operations, and steer reserve requirements through twelve quarters without tipping the economy.
Run First National Bank for four quarters. Set rates, approve loans, buy T-bonds, absorb defaults — and keep the Fed off your back.
Serve each borrower the right interest rate by shifting the money supply with reserve requirements and bond operations. Nine orders, plus a crisis or two.
The Fed acts and six dials have to follow: money supply, money demand, the nominal rate, bond prices, investment, and aggregate demand. Anyone who forgets bond prices move opposite rates is either confused or lying, and you have to work out which.
Exchange rates, the FOREX market, and the mirror relationship between two currencies.
One event, two currency markets. Predict how the USD and CAD move at the same time — and see the mirror relationship in action.
Demand for dollars, supply of dollars, the exchange rate, exports, imports, and net capital inflow. Every dial pulls on the next one, so a single wrong peg sets the whole table arguing about which link broke.