A game about experiments and market risk
Ice Cream Shop
Run ice cream shops against a hidden demand. Every morning you order ice cream and a 3D street shows what happens: the queue, the emptying tubs, customers leaving empty-handed or ice cream in the bin at closing. Six levels teach how to collect data from experiments, estimate risk before the market grows, spot trends and discover how price and demand depend on each other.
What is the Ice Cream Shop simulation?
Ice Cream Shop is a solo training game for innovation, product discovery and risk management training. Every participant plays on their own device, but everyone in a session shares one market, drawn once at the start: the demand for five flavours in eight shops and the highest price each place's customers accept. That keeps the ranking fair. Players do not know these numbers in advance - they discover them from their own sales, the sold-out time and the lost revenue.
The game grows level by level: one flavour in one shop, five flavours, five shops along a street, prices of your own, then a longer street where a demand peak moves for 20 days, and finally demand that depends on the price. What was learned earlier stays true, so knowledge from one level pays off in the next. Every day lands in a sales log that exports to CSV and Excel, and after each level the game reveals the real demand and the maximum possible profit. The trainer can stop the group after each level for a debrief, let players start over and show a ranking at the end.
See how it works
Order too little and the queue walks away, too much and it ends up in the bin
Features
Key capabilities
A 3D street
The shop, its queue and tubs that empty through the day. The scene grows with the level: from a cart on the square to a street of eight shops - square, park, beach, station, campus, mall, museum and gas station, each in its own surroundings.
A sales log
Every day is written to a table: kilograms bought, sold and thrown away, and the time the stock ran out. Export to CSV and Excel for analysis outside the game.
Lost revenue against ice cream in the bin
After every day the player sees how much revenue was lost to shortages and what the leftovers in the bin cost. They learn to weigh both risks before ordering more.
Six levels, one body of knowledge
One flavour (5 days), five flavours, five shops, your own prices, moving demand across eight shops (20 days) and finally a price that drives demand. The market of earlier levels never changes, so good exploration early on pays off later.
A hidden maximum price
On the last level players set prices. Above a place's limit nobody buys, so testing a price with a full tub is an expensive experiment.
The trainer leads, the ranking sums up
The trainer-led mode stops the group after every level. The trainer sees each participant's progress, profit and efficiency, can let them start over (the ranking keeps the better game) and shows the ranking on the projector at the end.
Moving demand
On the fifth level the street has eight shops and a demand peak moves along it one shop a day, in a direction drawn for the session. Whoever spots the trend in the data orders where the peak will be tomorrow.
Price and demand
On the sixth level a lower price draws more customers: at cost + 10% demand rises by 500%, at the highest accepted price it falls to zero. Players have to discover this relationship themselves and find the price that earns the most.
Efficiency dial and quick orders
Above every shop a dial shows the last day's efficiency (100% = nothing binned and nobody without ice cream), and clicking a shop zooms in on it. In the order table one click copies the row from the shop above or puts one amount into a whole column.
Step by step
How it works
Open a session
Create an Ice Cream Shop session, choose the pacing (trainer-led or own pace), the demand variability and whether participants may start over. Show the code or QR code.
Participants play
Every morning each participant orders ice cream, watches the day on the street and collects data. You see live who is on which level and day.
A debrief after each level
After each level the game reveals the demand and the maximum profit. In the trainer-led mode the group waits until you open the next level.
Ranking and conclusions
At the end show the ranking by profit or by efficiency and compare the experimenting strategies.
Use cases
What it’s good for
- Innovation training: the experiment as a way to reduce uncertainty.
- Product discovery: testing demand hypotheses cheaply before a product scales.
- Risk management: the cost of running short against the cost of surplus, and estimating variability.
- Data analysis classes: working with censored data, export to Excel and demand models of your own.
- A pricing workshop: finding the price limit without losing all the sales.
- University classes in operations management: the newsvendor problem in practice.
- Forecasting and pricing workshops: looking for a trend in sales data and discovering how the price affects demand.
White label
Your brand for participants
On the paid plans you can add your company name, logo and colors, and during every session participants will see your brand instead of Verbalu.
Training by Octigo
Want this run as a full training?
You are free to run our games and simulations on your own. But if you would like us to deliver a complete training, with a professional debrief and the concepts behind the “Ice Cream Shop” simulation explained in depth, get in touch. Octigo is a professional training company with 20 years of experience and many awards for its simulations.
- 20 years of experience in corporate training
- Award-winning training simulations
- A professional debrief and takeaways after the session
- A programme tailored to your goals and your team
Prefer to write to us directly? szkolenia@octigo.pl
Try “Ice Cream Shop” in Verbalu
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