Cranham Scout Group

Here’s the game we played with the Cubs yesterday evening:

MATERIALS: Money tokens (I’ll cut some paper up into triangles, each is a pound), blank sheets of A4 paper.

We split the pack into one group per adult available except me, each of which gets assigned a line of business: folding paper planes from sheets of blank A4 they buy, or mining sheets of A4 paper from a pile to sell (to do this, they need to buy a centimetre’s thickness of paper from me for fifty pounds…), or I (in the kitchen) will sell a drink or a biscuit for a pound each. The businesses need to buy their raw materials or mining rights, and they also need to pay their staff at the end of the ‘work day’ (every time I blow my whistle), who will ultimately spend their earnings on paper planes or drinks and biscuits. If I blow my whistle and a company doesn’t have enough money to pay all their staff (the cubs), then that company is bankrupt. They’re out! The cubs get to continue to spend any money they have earnt, but the company has ceased operating, so they won’t get any more.

But to start with, they have nothing, apart from the kitchen leader who will sell drinks, biscuits, and wodges of paper (‘paper mines’). So they can’t even get started – so they need to come to me (as the bank) and borrow money. I’ll lend them loans of ten pounds, but for every loan, I will require a pound back every time I blow my whistle.

So the adults leading the mining companies will need to take out a big loan to buy a wodge of paper – and they’ll need to compete with each other to actually sell the stuff, as they need to have five pounds back every time I blow my whistle in loan repayments, as well as enough to pay their staff. They represent capital-heavy mining industry. I suggest they sell paper at about a pound for four sheets. I’ll give the mining companies just a couple of cubs each, since they don’t need much workforce.

The adults leading the paper plane companies will not need such big loans, as they just need to pay for paper and their staff. They represent light industry. They should buy their paper from whoever’s cheapest. The paper plane companies will get larger numbers of cubs, as they need to get folding! As I expect the supply of planes to far outstrip demand, I suspect the paper plane companies will soon end up in lots of debt, and may soon find that it’s cheaper for them to stop buying paper and just pay their staff to become salespeople, begging the cubs to buy the planes rather than drinks or biscuits…

The adults leading the company hold the company’s money, and prevent squandering of the company’s resources.

I’ll blow my whistle every few minutes. As the cubs start to accumulate money of their own, one pound per whistle blow unless their company goes bankrupt, they will be able to buy drinks and biscuits from me, and paper planes from the plane companies (which they will get to throw at the end). And any company can ask me for a loan whenever it wants; since I expect demand for drinks and biscuits to far exceed that for paper planes, the money should drain out of the market fast, so companies should find themselves depending on loans to keep going.

But – oh dear. I’ll suddenly stop giving out loans. It’s credit crunch time! Soon everyone will be out of a job!