Version 9 | Visibility of an Entrepreneur’s Personality in their Startup

A startup is lifeless in itself. The life is put in by the founder. Right from the leadership style to the vision to the brand identity, everything is engrained by the founder. It is an inevitable reflection of the founder’s passion, values, and ambitions — which ultimately stem from the founder’s personality.

This is not talked about often — but a founder’s personality has a crucial role in the success of a startup and its patrons. There are countless examples of the same, whether it be the startup’s success or downfall.

As it is said, “A startup is a canvas where your personality shines, and every stroke you make reflects your passion and vision.”

If a founder’s personality is so essential, why not add it to the game to make people release the power of having a strong personality, mindset and belief?

Introducing Personality Cards

Anyone can become a successful entrepreneur. Bill Gates is an introvert. Elon Musk is an extrovert. The point is you should know your personality trait and use that in the best manner possible. On the back of the Player Board, every entrepreneur has been assigned a Personality, and each personality has a strategic and unique benefit that entrepreneurs can use in the middle of the game.

For example, X has a personality that of a Hustler, and its benefit allows him to draw extra 2 Opportunity Cards for free. However, this is something X will only be able to do at some turns, but instead, there is a certain confidence level required to use your trait (indicated on the player board itself).

Each personality has a different confidence level and the confidence increases by 1 after the entrepreneur plays their turn. The same has to be tracked with the help of tokens and the player board. Alternatively, instead of waiting for those many rounds, the entrepreneurs can also pay 2 hours in the middle to speed up their personality’s confidence by 1 level.

The kind of personality also determines the number of Resource Cards you would start with to balance the game and the strategic benefits these personalities offer.

The personalities I have added:

Introducing these Personality Cards would enhance the game’s fun and emphasise building a resilient and robust personality for anyone who aspires to be a founder.

People often think business is about having a solid supply chain, building a sound technology platform and funds. Still, I hope this inclusion draws attention towards a founder’s mentality, way of dealing with successes and failures, among many other traits that are equally important, if not more, to run a business.

The only problem with this addition could be the increased complexity that this would bring to the game. What’s the best way to test out this hypothesis? Playtest, playtest and playtest.

Update on the Market Force Cards

People absolutely loved this addition. This makes the games more fun and engaging. These cards break the linear pace of the game and keep the founder on their toes, as they have no idea when a Market Force will be triggered and what it contains.

This requires instant strategic planning from the founders to tackle the market forces, and the positive market forces also challenge the founder’s fear of the unknown :)

Update on the Networking Cards

After playtesting with the updated version of these cards, I have realised that these cards are the source of 1 founder’s laughter and 1 founder’s sigh. However, since these are only 18 in number, I have thought of having a fixed cost for every card, irrespective of the content.

Instead, I have balanced the cards’ benefits so that every card, when used most optimally, gives an equal advantage to every founder.

Update on Freelancing

This aspect has been tricky for me to navigate through. This element brings out the most usage of money; however, since it is negotiation based, this increases the game time and fails the strategic planning of founders if a fellow founder is not budging.

Moreover, since the game at the end is against each other (competitive), this element is hardly used towards the latter part of the game.

If this were to be removed, then there would not be other utilisation of money that would make the game extremely skewed. Either a mechanism to make this practical and less subjective in the game has to be put through, or removing this and introducing another use case of money must be considered.

Until I come up with the solution to this roadblock, I would continue playtesting to test out the Personality Cards and firm my assumptions and observations about other elements with other players.

To all the people reading this without reading the previous articles, I am in the middle of making a startup-themed board game. I am documenting my progress as I move forward. I keep discussing the various roadblocks, the attempted solutions and my next step through these articles.

The game aims to get entrepreneurship and startup into the mainstream, and boardgames are an excellent way to do it. If you like the idea or want to contribute, please visit entrepi.world and contact us!