Editor's note: An earlier version of this article reported, as news, that London Business School, Oxford Saïd, Warwick, and Imperial College Business School had specifically adopted strategy board games into their MBA curricula, complete with named professor quotes, a cited Harvard Business Review study, and reaction from McKinsey, Deloitte, and Goldman Sachs. We have been unable to verify that these specific curriculum changes, quotes, or the cited study exist, and no matching public record could be located for any of them. We've rewritten this piece as an honest discussion of why game-based learning has genuine potential in business education, without presenting invented claims as real news. If any of these institutions have genuinely made moves in this direction, we'd welcome a correction with a verifiable source.
The Underlying Idea Has Real Merit
Business education has long relied heavily on the case study method—reading through a detailed account of a real company's situation and debating what its leaders should have done. It's a respected, well-established teaching tool. But it has a structural limitation: students analyse decisions with the benefit of hindsight, complete information, and unlimited time, none of which reflect how real business decisions actually get made.
Strategic board games address that gap in a specific way: they force decisions under time pressure, with incomplete information, and with real (if game-scale) consequences for getting it wrong. That's a genuinely different kind of learning experience than reading a case study, and it maps onto skills business schools say they want to develop—negotiation, resource allocation under uncertainty, and adaptive strategy.
None of this means specific business schools have adopted games into their MBA curricula—we don't have verified evidence that they have. But the pedagogical logic for why they might want to is sound, and it's consistent with the broader, well-supported case for experiential and game-based learning in education generally.
Where Games Plausibly Add Value in Business Education
Negotiation Skills
Traditional negotiation teaching typically combines theory (such as Fisher and Ury's well-known book Getting to Yes) with a handful of role-play exercises. Multi-player negotiation games—Diplomacy is the classic example—offer something role-play struggles to replicate: repeated practice (many negotiations in a single session rather than two or three), real stakes within the game, and immediate feedback on whether an approach worked.
Resource Allocation Under Uncertainty
Games like Power Grid, which require players to buy power plants, purchase fuel, and expand a network under competitive and financial constraints, put students through the same kind of opportunity-cost reasoning that spreadsheet exercises and optimisation formulas describe abstractly. Learning to manage a budget where every choice forecloses another option is arguably better internalised through play than through a lecture on linear programming.
Adaptive Strategy
Games with hidden information and multiple viable strategies—Catan is a common example—require players to read opponents, notice when a plan isn't working, and pivot. That's a close analogue to strategic pivoting in a real business, and it's difficult to teach through frameworks like SWOT analysis alone, since those tend to be applied retrospectively rather than practised under live pressure.
What a Well-Designed Module Might Look Like
If a business school wanted to build a genuine strategic-gaming module, a sensible structure would likely include:
- Resource allocation simulations (games like Power Grid or Brass: Birmingham) for operations and strategy modules
- Negotiation and coalition-building exercises (games like Diplomacy or Chinatown) for organisational behaviour modules
- Market dynamics and competition (games like Catan or Acquire) for strategy modules
- Structured debrief and reflection after each session, since the research on experiential learning consistently emphasises that reflection—not just the activity itself—is what cements the learning
- Assessment that blends decision-making process, post-game analysis, and facilitated performance, rather than grading purely on who won
Why We're Cautious About Overclaiming Here
It's tempting to cite specific percentage improvements in negotiation outcomes, retention rates, or investment returns for game-trained versus traditionally-taught students. We don't have a verified, peer-reviewed study that measures these things precisely for MBA-level business education, so we're not going to invent numbers to make the case sound more dramatic than it is. The honest version of this argument is: the pedagogical logic is sound, experiential learning research broadly supports it, and it would be a genuinely interesting area for a business school to properly research and publish on—we just can't tell you that one already has.
The Bottom Line
Strategic board games have real, defensible potential as a complement to case-study-based MBA teaching—not because of a specific announcement we can point to, but because the underlying pedagogy (repeated practice, real stakes, immediate feedback, decisions under uncertainty) addresses genuine limitations of the case study method. If UK business schools do move in this direction, it would be consistent with the broader shift toward experiential, game-based learning happening across UK education more generally. We just can't report that they already have, since we can't verify that claim.
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