For students
Signing in
Accounts are email and password. If your instructor has reset your password, they will hand you a temporary one to sign in with.
Creating your own account instead? Choose Student in the “I am a…” selector — that choice decides which side of the app you see and cannot be changed by you afterwards.
Joining a class
Your instructor gives you a join code. Enter it on your dashboard and you are in.
- Create or join a team. A team can have one to three members — classmates running the same company together.
- Start a game — name the company and pick a starting strategy. A team runs one game at a time; once it finishes, the same team can start another.
- Click Play.
The game shell
Every screen sits in the same frame, so the things you check constantly never move.
Beside those sit Brand — your reputation, which builds slowly and decays if neglected — and Composite, the overall score your instructor’s leaderboard ranks on.
Pinned to the bottom is the submit bar. It is always visible, and it always tells you how many decisions you have staged but not yet committed.
How a quarter works
This is the one thing to understand before anything else.
Your edits are staged, not applied. Changing a price, queueing research or opening a market does not take effect when you click. It goes into a draft for the current quarter. The screens preview what those decisions would do — nothing is committed until you press Submit.
- Move between tabs freely and revise anything before submitting.
- The counter in the submit bar tells you how much is pending.
- Reload the page before submitting and your staged decisions are gone. Submit before you walk away.
- Once you submit, the quarter resolves on the server. There is no undo.
Overview is where you start each quarter: portfolio, latest news, last quarter’s headline figures, and the strategy journal where you write what you are trying to do and why. Instructors read those entries alongside your decisions and they usually count toward your grade — so write them as you go, not at the end.
The decision screens
Fourteen screens, each owning one part of the business.
Design Studio
A model is a product line; a generation is a frozen version of its hardware. Once a generation ships, its components lock — to change them you start a new one.
A faster processor costs more per unit and may need research first. A bigger display lifts quality but hurts battery life and weight. The panel tracks unit cost, price and margin, battery life, weight, quality index, and segment fit — how well this design suits the customers you are aiming at.
Pricing
Set the price for each generation. The screen shows your margin and the price points the choice contributes to your rating: under a segment’s reference price you gain points, over it you lose them, scaled by how price-sensitive that segment is.
| Segment | Reference price | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
| Value Seekers | $110 | Price above all |
| Athletes & Fitness | $240 | Sensors and battery |
| Health Guardians | $300 | Accuracy and trust |
| Professionals | $420 | Performance and polish |
| Style Icons | $520 | Brand and materials |
Production
How many units to build, and where. Under-build and demand goes unserved; over-build and you pay to hold the inventory.
Marketing
Budget, channel and creative per product. Marketing builds awareness, and awareness decays — a campaign is not a one-off purchase.
Supply
Choose a supplier per component category. They differ on cost, quality and reliability, and the cheap one is not always the wrong answer.
Distribution
Forty country markets, and four ways to reach each one.
| Route | Strength | Cost of it |
|---|---|---|
| Online | Reaches everyone | Reaches them weakly |
| Distributors | Fast to set up | They take 28%, and your campaigns don’t apply |
| Carriers | A separate route to market | Terms vary by country |
| Own stores | Full control | Tie up capital, per-quarter running cost |
It also flags white space — country-and-segment cells where no competitor has meaningful distribution.
Logistics
Warehouses and freight: where stock sits, and what it costs to move.
R&D
Fund research and queue technologies. Completed research unlocks better components in the Design Studio — and it takes quarters to pay off, so starting late rarely helps.
Financing
Debt, equity and cash management. Interest is a real line on your income statement.
Intel
What the competition is doing — their products, prices and positions.
Reports
Income statement, balance sheet, and the balanced scorecard that drives your composite score across eight dimensions.
A company can be profitable and still score poorly if it is thin on brand, quality or innovation. That is deliberate.
My Activity
Your own quarter-by-quarter log: what you decided, what happened, and your journal entries.
Academy
Short lessons with knowledge checks. Scores are recorded and may count toward your grade.
Submitting a quarter
The server resolves the market against your rivals and shows you the result.
Read it before clicking through. This is the feedback your next set of decisions should be answering.
The Final Performance Review
After the last quarter the game closes and opens the Final Performance Review: your final market standing, the journey quarter by quarter, and a report card across the eight scorecard dimensions. The submit control stays on screen but is disabled — the run is over.
For instructors
Creating a class
Name the class, set how many quarters it runs (1–40, default 16) and choose the opponents. VentureWrist generates a join code — share that, and it is the only thing your students need.
There is no cap on class size — every student with the join code can enrol, and the class can hold as many teams as needed. Each team can have up to three members, and a team runs one game at a time; once a run finishes, the same team can start another.
The class console Instructor
The header carries the join code, roster size and length. Below it, five tabs.
Students
The roster and each student’s progress. Also where you reset a password: the system issues a temporary one, shows it to you exactly once, and revokes all of that student’s existing sessions.
Teams
Which teams exist and who is on them.
Grading
Enter or override a score per student. The default weighting combines the balanced scorecard, quiz results from the Academy, and journal entries — and you can change those weights in Settings.
The review drilldown
The most useful screen for marking.
Review → on any leaderboard row opens that student’s run quarter by quarter: what they decided, and what they said they were doing. It shows you not just what they scored but whether their reasoning held together — usually the thing you actually want to assess.
Export CSV on the class header pulls the leaderboard out for your own gradebook.
Running a session
- Every team’s quarter resolves against the same market and the same rivals, so results are comparable across the class.
- Resolution is deterministic: the same game, quarter and decisions always produce the same outcome. A disputed result can be checked rather than argued.
- Students cannot see each other’s decisions, and cannot resolve a quarter locally — the server is the only place a quarter is computed.
- Insist on journals early. They are what turn a leaderboard into something you can grade fairly.
Access & roles
| Capability | Students | Instructors |
|---|---|---|
| Join a class by code | Yes | — |
| Create a class | — | Yes |
| See other students’ decisions | — | Own class only |
| Resolve a quarter | Via Submit | — |
| Reset a password | — | Own class only |
| Export the leaderboard | — | Yes |
Instructors can only see and change classes they own — a second instructor gets a 403 on someone else’s class. Students can only reach classes they are enrolled in.
Sizes & limits
| Limit | |
|---|---|
| Students per class | No limit — anyone with the join code can enrol |
| Teams per class | No limit |
| Classes per instructor | No limit |
| Members per team | 1–3 |
| Games in progress per team | 1 |
Each team can have one to three members. The setting exists in the data model but the class form does not expose it yet.