Fireworks, The Entrepreneurship Game: Launching a Startup

The player is the founder and chief executive of a company called Alpha-Beta Games, which is building and bringing to market a business simulation game for financial service companies. The goal is to develop an entrepreneurial concept, create an organization, build a culture of customer centricity, give it meaning and launch the product successfully.

Play moves through a six-part journey of entrepreneurial business scenarios. Choosing the best answer in each scenario earns Viability Points, a measure of the product's vitality in the marketplace. As points accumulate the player climbs through five levels: On the Drawing Board, Showing Promise, Getting Traction, Looking Great! and It's a Winner! At 80 percent viability the concept counts as realized in the market, and the company is sold to Magna Corp for $1 billion.

A coach is built into the game in the form of the company's Chairman, who plays the Sage, the wise figure who offers objective and supportive views. The emotional intelligence angle shows in the scoring, which puts greater weight on value-based metrics tied to emotionally intelligent business practice.

The game is intended for college and university students, mid-level corporate executives and entrepreneurs in incubators and other entrepreneurial development organizations. Players meet specific business concepts as they follow an idea from the first sketch to a product on the market. The contest's own game page lists the skills taught as the entrepreneurial journey, developing the idea, realizing the idea, building the company and selling it.

The 2018 Showcase & Challenge page lists the other finalists and winners from that year.

The Serious Games Showcase & Challenge still lists the game, under the name Fireworks, The Entrepreneurship Game, with E. I. Games LLC as the organization, Business as the category and 2018 as the release year.

E.I. Games runs eigames.com, titled EQ & Leadership Games for College Classrooms, with a player sign-in on a separate address that welcomes existing accounts and visitors with an access code, so a hosted player site is still running. The company's games page lists seven course games, among them an Entrepreneurship Game offered on request for a demo. The page does not say whether that game is Fireworks, and no page on the company's site names Fireworks. The company's awards page counts seven recognitions from the International Serious Play Awards, the first in 2014, and does not mention the Showcase & Challenge.