https://fee.org/articles/forget-monopoly-this-board-game-really-simulates-capitalism/ "For many of us, our first exposure to running anything like a business was the first game of Monopoly we played as children. This is somewhat problematic, to say the least. In Monopoly, the only purpose of acquiring properties and developing them is to slowly bleed your friends of all their money, giving them nothing in return. There's a better game out there; one that captures the nuances of capitalism while also being simpler and, frankly, more fun than Monopoly. That game is Karsten Hartwig's 1999 classic, Chinatown. The Quintessential Trading Game In Chinatown, players take on the roles of Chinese-American immigrant businesspeople in the 1960s. Each round, they acquire properties in Lower Manhattan's Chinatown along with business tiles that can be used to place certain types of businesses on those properties. The most profitable businesses can be formed by combining enough business tiles of the same type on adjacent properties to make one full-sized business, such as a laundromat, dim sum restaurant, garment factory, or florist. The majority of the game is spent during each of the six trading phases, during which all players can simultaneously negotiate with each other to trade properties, tiles, and cash until everyone has made every deal they want to make. This is the beauty of Chinatown: the game establishes a few simple rules for creating value, it assigns basic property rights over the tools necessary to create this value, and then it just lets things happen. The trading emerges naturally from the circumstances as each player realizes that he could be much richer if he only had that one property his friend just drew. [...] Conclusion Chinatown is far from the only excellent economic board game on the market. Power Grid, Food Chain Magnate, Brass, and hundreds more economic games explore themes of trade and commerce. But Chinatown stands out as a particularly elegant example of the genre. From an economics perspective, the great thing about the market dynamics of Chinatown is that they emerge organically from players' decisions. In many games, the economics of the game come from the mechanics created by the game designer. These are often clever and inventive, and in many cases, they reflect interesting observations about markets. But nothing quite beats the way Chinatown sets up the most simple of rules and lets the players discover the benefits of trade for themselves."