Are there any games that explore economic theory? I keep coming up with games that would embody Austrian economic principles. In my imagination they are very solid, realistic and yet fun and simple.
There are quite a lot of board games based on supply and demand mechanics, often with rules for trading and opportunities to inflate or crash the market for a particular good.
Offworld Trading Company is an extremely good game!
It is designed as a board game, too, with board-game-style rules. The game is a combination of real-time and turn-based (for auctions) and each tick of the real-time game is actually a simulated 'turn.' https://www.mohawkgames.com/2014/06/16/offworld-rules/
Crisis, one of the games listed in TFA, is this, and a pretty rich one. With of course its specific slice of economic simulation, since you can't have a single game trying to simulate all of economics.
There are many many games that embody small parts of economic theory, but few that bother with a "full" simulation. I'd suspect it's a little too fragile to guarantee a fun gameplay (as in, many logical economic outcomes might not be thrilling to simulate). Here's some notables off the top of my head though:
- Food Chain Magnate - interesting recent game that explores some aspects of pricing, marketing, and management structure. A lot is abstracted away, but it does a great job of creating strategic depth off of a few basic tenets.
- Container - cutthroat pricing and resource delivery game about shipping/manufacturing companies. Players must sell to each other and cooperate somewhat to keep the economy viable. One of the harder simulations I've seen; the market definitely can crash or stall in this game, which some people complain about but I find very interesting.
- Stockpile - very basic game about information in the stock market, but handles the ideas quite elegantly.
- Power Grid - one of the best-known and highest-rated of realistic auction games, also features a resource market. To me, Power Grid is most notable as an economic game on a meta level: it's spawned many different maps and expansions and each one plays differently, usually only based on small tweaks to the power plants available or the arrangement of the network or 1 or 2 rules twists.
- "18XX games" - this is an entire genre of "train games" that are generally about building rail lines in the early days or railroad expansion, but often include additional "hard" economic aspects, like the ownership and valuation of stock in the companies (some of them even grant most of the traditional player agency to the companies themselves, and then control is inherited by the majority shareholder, so depending on stock, 1 player could control multiple companies and another could control none). I'm just starting to play these games so I can't give much more detail yet but they are definitely worth looking into.
- Acquire - a downright classic game about mergers and acquisitions between hotel / real estate companies.
- Modern Art - another classic about emergent value in the art industry; very simple design begats complex play.
There's also a whole slate of more generic eurogames that breach into interesting economic areas, Brass, Panamax, Arkwright, and Kanban are some jumping off points there. Even less economic-themed games breach many cool concepts; certainly whenever I play my favorite game, Keyflower, I'm thinking about how to value actions over goods and how the global value of the different currencies (meeple colors) is fluctuating and how much game-end wealth delta an early denial to my opponent is worth to me...
