This post presents an excel-based game I created. I have called this game ‘Life Choices’. I have two previous posts which explain how the game can be played using video presentations. This post will use screenshots from the game to explain how it is played.
Life Choices is a game that applies economic concepts to decision-making. Unlike many other games, the objective of Life Choices is not to make the most money but to instead maximise happiness. Managing money is still an important part of the game as a negative dollar value will wipe out your happiness score. The key concepts applied to the game are utility, risk, and choice.
The maximisation of happiness requires the understanding of utility. What decisions should be made to maximise utility? The game gives the player the option to buy goods and services, each good and service provides a level of utility. The player must decide if the utility yielded from the good or service is sufficient for the cost requirement; remember if you spend too much and become in debt, you will lose all your happiness.
Risk plays an enormous part in this game. There is the risk of negative dollars and losing all utility. There are risk cards. This allows the player to bet on activities such as sports events or just rolling the dice. There are cards of random events, which may cost money now but can be rewarded later with awarding of karma points. Rolling the dice even offers choices that involve selection the type of card; the game has ‘buy’ cards, ‘gamble’ cards, ‘random’ cards ‘karma’ cards, ‘special’ cards, and ‘lottery’ cards; These cards are explained in the instructions. Should the player select a ‘random’ card and rely on chance or choose a ‘buy’ card, where the player can opt out of buying anything.
The whole game is about choices. There are numerous strategies a player can adopt to obtain victory, high or low risk. The player can even select the personality of their character in the set-up page. Do you want to play the altruist, the materialist or even the joker; it’s your choice.
Instructions and Demonstration on How to Play
To begin click the ‘Play Game’ button. This will take you to the start menu. On this page, select the number of players. The game allows between 1 and 4 players. Choose the number of rounds, the game allows games of 12, 18 and 24 rounds. Players have the choice of selecting the starting money, happiness, and karma. The Default values are $150, happiness of 10 smiles, and karma of 0. Enter the details of each player; the player’s name and the game personality. Life Choices has 6 game personalities to choose from, they are:
- Altruist
- Materialist
- Workaholic
- Idler
- Joker
- Balanced
Each personality type has its own strengthens and weaknesses and require slightly different strategies to be successful in the game. After entering each players details, click the ‘Begin’ button.
You should be on your players screen. You should see your name and player personality photo. To play click the ‘Roll Dice’ button. You will roll a number between 2 and 12.
- If you rolled 2 or 12, select a 'special' or a 'discount' card
- If you rolled 3 or 4, select a 'gamble' or a 'buy' card
- If you rolled 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9, select a 'random' or a 'buy' card
- If you rolled 10 or 11, select a 'karma' card
Special cards offer special bonuses in money, happiness, or karma. Discount cards are buy cards with discounts on price. Buy cards allow players to buy goods or services with their money. Gamble cards allow users to gamble on events (these cards are very high risk but can offer big returns). Random cards are any of the available cards and include a win lottery card. 'Karma' cards reward players for kind acts performed in the game or punish for selfish acts committed. There are lottery cards available if the player rolls 1, a player can roll 1, if the special 1 roll card has been selected. Select the card you want and click the respective button.
So let’s take a look at the outcome of the first roll.
The player has two simple coin flips to decide the outcome of the round. Two tails or two heads wins $100 and tails or heads loses the player $10. Click the flip coin button to determine the result.
The outcome is two tails, the player wins $100. Click the confirm button to process the result of the round.
This is the result of the first round. The screen shows:
- The round number
- Number of rounds remaining
- Money
- Happiness
- Karma
This is player 2’s opening screen. This screen shows the player’s name as well as personality type. Player two has chosen the personality type of ‘Idler’ which comes with the picture of ‘Mylo the dog’.
Player 2 has rolled 3, therefore has a choice of ‘buy’ cards or ‘gamble’ cards.
Let’s select the option to buy something with our money. The player has the choice to buy a medium car that will give the player 6 smiles (unit for happiness). Let’s buy the car and see what happens.
$80 has been deducted and 6 smiles to happiness has been added to the player's score as can be seen from the screenshot below.
Player 1’s next roll is 7, Player 1 now has a choice of a ‘random’ card or a ‘buy’ card. Let’s select a ‘random’ card this time and see what happens.
The ‘random’ card produced a ‘karma’ card. ‘Karma’ cards are great if the player has accumulated karma. They can be very harmful if the player has negative karma. The player has zero karma at this point and unfortunately loses 1 smile based on criteria stipulated in the card.
As this a 12 round game, I will not cover all rounds but just some of the rounds with different types of questions.
The next question is the in the ‘gamble’ question category. It is a spin the wheel question. The player needs to select a number between 1 and 32. For this question, if the player selects correctly, the player will win $1000. If the player selects incorrectly, the player will lose $50. In the screenshot below, the player choose 23 and the spin produced 24, therefore the player lost $50.
The next question is in the ‘random’ question category. The player needs to choose between a holiday in the mountains or beach resort. The player choose the beach resort to obtain 6 smiles for the price of $20.
The next question is in the ‘random’ question category. The player needs to choose to perform an act of kindness for an injured dog at the sacrifice of money and the evening out at dinner or to just ignore the injured dog. The act of kindness will reward the player with karma which may produce an unknown payout later in the game. See the screenshot below.
If a player has negative money, happiness score drops to -1000, the happiness score will return to positive once money becomes positive again. See the screenshot below for the effect of negative money.
The next question involves choosing between a lump sum payment ($100) or a payment based on rounds remaining in the game ($10 × rounds left in game). If there are more than 10 rounds in the game choosing a payoff based on the rounds remaining is the better option. The screenshot below shows a payoff based on 6 rounds remaining.
Rolling two sixes or two ones allows the player to choose between a ‘special’ card or a ‘discount’ card. A ‘special’ card has been selected in this game.
The ‘special’ card selection produced a lottery win for the player.
The next question involves choosing between donating to charity or not. Donating may cost money but it provides some happiness and karma.
The next question involves choosing between being honest or dishonest. Honesty will cost the player money while dishonesty will cost the player karma.
The next question looks at the ‘gamble’ question category. This question looks at betting on a boxing match. The winner of the boxing match is decided by the roll of a dice. For this question, roll 1 or 2 for Rita to win and roll any other number for Candice to win. The player bet on Candice and rolled 2 and lost the bet and $50; see screenshot below.
After the final round, The ‘Final’ button will appear, click the ‘Final’ button, this will take you to the next player to finish their game or it will take you to the game final results screen.
The final results screen will show each players score and will name the winner of the game. You can enter your score as a top player, by clicking the ‘Top Score’ button; only the top five scores will be displayed on this page.
You can view all previous winners by clicking the ‘View All Winners’ button. The game is over, if you want to play again click the ‘Play Again’ button. Enjoy the game.
This brings me to the end of this post describing how the game ‘Life Choices’ is played and it’s various elements. I hope you enjoyed the post. I will make a downloadable version of the game soon for anyone interested. Thanks for reading the blog.
This is the link to the first 'Life Choices' Steemit blog: https://steemit.com/excel/@spectrumecons/fun-excel-game
This is the link to the second 'Life Choices' Steemit blog: https://steemit.com/games/@spectrumecons/life-choices-an-economics-excel-based-game
Here is the link to the YouTube Video:
