If you want to do well when playing the Business Strategy Game (BSG), the most important tip I have for you is to study the Player’s Guide as if it’s preparation for a college-level final exam. That means not merely casually skimming the guide in a few minutes, but really putting effort into reading every single paragraph, taking notes, printing it out, highlighting everything that seems important, and then reviewing anything that seems difficult or confusing until you feel confident that you understand it.
This may seem like obvious advice, but I frequently discover that students haven’t bothered to study the guide at all. While the guide doesn’t contain everything that’s important about the game, it does contain a lot of information that is essential to know and that becomes the basis for most winning strategies and tactics.
Yes, it’s a long 35 pages, but that’s a lot less information than most college textbooks contain. For some strange reason, many students don’t take the BSG game very seriously until they are losing the game with a very low score. It’s much more difficult to improve the poor results of a team that has made many bad decision due to ignorance of the basics of the game than to get started on the right track from the start.
So if you haven’t really studied the guide with diligence, then you can start right away by reading it now. Here’s a link to the PDF.