Boardcraft: Learning the Art of Strategic Decision-Making Card by Card

Boardcraft is a card-based, role-playing game developed at the Universidad de Burgos to teach strategic management within an undergraduate Business Administration degree. The paper presents the game's design and rationale and proposes a research protocol to test its effects. Its central premise is that strategic management is traditionally taught through lectures, texts, and case studies, which offer limited opportunities for practice in continuous decision-making. Boardcraft addresses this gap by having student teams act as a company's Strategic Committee, progressing through strategic analysis and formulation while preparing a final presentation for a simulated shareholders' meeting.

The game is structured in three stages (Who are we?, Strategic Analysis, and Strategic Choice) and uses Information, Decision, and Breaking News cards, with physical and virtual components and a digital road map. Its design emphasises engagement, humour, and visual appeal, drawing on game-based learning and experiential learning literature. The authors have not yet reported outcomes. Instead, they describe a planned pretest-posttest study with 50 to 60 students over one semester, combining an ad hoc questionnaire on decision-making attitudes, motivation, and soft skills with a qualitative discussion group. The authors note that a pilot was conducted in 2023-2024, and the full intervention was scheduled for 2024-2025. Target competencies include teamwork, negotiation, creativity, decision-making under uncertainty, and communication. The paper's conclusions are therefore hypothesis-driven: they expect the game to increase motivation and shift attitudes toward decision-making, but these expectations remain untested in the reported material.