Merchants: the Negotiation Game That Won Serious Play Gold

Merchants is the negotiation game from the Spanish company Gamelearn, which describes it as a complete course on negotiation, communication and conflict resolution. Players take the role of Carlo Vecchio, a young merchant in 15th-century Venice who wants to build a maritime trading empire. Mentors include Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli. A simulator recreates six real negotiation cases in which participants practice negotiating, presenting a proposal and resolving conflicts, and it gives personalized feedback.

The game is meant for professionals who need to close agreements in their daily work. Gamelearn builds each of its titles from three elements: highly pragmatic content for immediate use at work, a playful immersive context, and an advanced simulator that recreates life-like negotiations. The company describes its platform as cloud-based, reachable with only an internet connection, usable on PC, tablet and smartphone, and translated into at least four languages. Gamelearn says the content is based on the Harvard negotiation method developed by professors Roger Fisher, Bruce Patton and William Ury.

Merchants earned a gold medal in the 2020 International Serious Play Awards, a program that honors game-based learning in digital and tabletop form. At that time Gamelearn described itself as a company with 12 years of experience that had trained more than 200,000 professionals from more than 2,500 organizations. Its portfolio also listed Pacific, a step-by-step guide to leading and managing high-performance teams; Triskelion, an adventure about building a personal time management system; 2100, with 27 real customer service situations that can be customized; and Aqua, a practice course in giving effective, actionable feedback. All of them are cloud-based courses built on the same kind of simulator as Merchants. The company was headquartered in Pozuelo de Alarcón, Spain, with offices in Barcelona, Mexico City and Miami.

The game-learn.com address now forwards to gamestrategies.io, and the footer of that page reads "Game Strategies (antes Gamelearn)", so the company operates under a new name. The Game Strategies front page does not name Merchants. It does offer negotiation training in general.

Merchants does appear on a Game Strategies blog page, which calls it "Gamelearn's negotiation and conflict resolution simulator". That page dates from 2014 and gives no price or access details. Whether Merchants can be bought under that name today is not confirmed.