Free lean training game · Play online or print the facilitator guide

The Beer Game: play it free, or print the facilitator guide.

The beer distribution game is the classic lean exercise for the bullwhip effect — four businesses in a line, one product, and four weeks between ordering beer and getting it. Run the shop at the end of the line for 36 weeks right here, or print the guide and run it at a table.

Play the beer game Get the facilitator guide

Time: 20 min · 2–3 hr as a group
People: 1, or 4 per chain
Teaches: Delay · order swings · systems thinking
Cost: Free, no signup

You run the shop. Each week you see what customers bought, what arrived, and what you owe, and you decide one thing: how much beer to order. Your order reaches your supplier two weeks later and the beer arrives two weeks after that. At the end you get every business’s orders plotted week by week, next to the same 36 weeks played by someone who never panicked.

What is the beer game?

The beer game — also called the beer distribution game — puts four businesses in a line: the factory, the distributor, the wholesaler, and a shop. Beer moves down the line towards customers. Orders move up it towards the factory. Nobody may talk to anyone else. The only thing that crosses the table is a piece of paper with a number on it.

Everything waits. Your order takes two weeks to reach your supplier. The beer then takes two weeks to be driven to you. So you wait four weeks between asking for beer and getting it, and during those four weeks you have to keep ordering blind. Beer sitting on the shelf costs you 50c a case a week. Beer you owe a customer costs you $1 a case a week — double — and it does not go away until you ship it.

Customers change what they buy exactly once, by a small amount, and then never again. That is the whole disturbance. Orders further up the line still swing wildly, shelves empty, and warehouses end up buried. This is the bullwhip effect: a small change near the customer gets bigger at every step away from them. It happens with four sensible people and it happens every time.

The exercise came out of MIT’s system dynamics group in the 1960s and was written up in the form most people run today by John Sterman in 1984. Forty years on it is still the quickest way to show a room that a system can fail while every single person in it is doing something reasonable.

How to run the beer game

This is the run sheet for a facilitator with a room. Everything below is on the printable guide too, in the order you need it.

What you need, per chain of four

Four people, one per role. Not pairs — when two people share a seat, one decides and the other just writes.
A table layout with a shelf and two road slots between each pair of businesses. Print it, or tape sheets of paper to the desk.
About 200 counters — pennies, poker chips, dried beans. Anything you can count fast.
One record sheet per person, plus order slips and a pencil.
A customer demand deck that only the shop may look at. Costs about a dollar to print and cut.

Seat the four roles far enough apart that they cannot read each other’s sheets. If they can see each other’s numbers, the no-talking rule dissolves on its own.

Set every chain up identically

Where	Cases	Why it matters
On every shelf	12	Three weeks of cover at the opening rate. Comfortable, and not enough.
In each road slot	4	Beer already driving. It arrives whatever anyone decides now.
In each order slot	4	Orders already travelling. Suppliers are reacting to last week.

Every chain starts balanced and boring. That is deliberate — it means whatever happens next was made in the room.

The week, six steps, always this order

Take in whatever arrives off the road.
Take in the order from whoever you sell to. The shop takes the top card off the demand deck.
Fill that order plus anything you already owe, as far as your shelf allows.
Put what you filled on the road. It takes two weeks to get there.
Write down your cost: 50c a case on the shelf, $1 a case you owe.
Send an order to your supplier. They see it two weeks from now.

Only step six is a decision. The other five are movement. Call all six aloud and slowly for the first few weeks, tell everyone to order exactly 4 while they learn the moves, and keep the week number written somewhere the whole room can see.

How long to book

Format	Set up	Play	Debrief	Total
At a table, on paper	10–20 min	60–90 min	40–90 min	2–3 hr
In a room, on screens	10 min	30–45 min	25–30 min	60–90 min
On your own, in this browser	0	~15 min	~5 min	~20 min

Book the debrief and protect it. A group that plays and goes to lunch remembers a hard afternoon. The lesson lives in the twenty minutes after the last week.

Facilitators only — this part gives the ending away

The moments that make or break the session

Customers. They want 4 cases a week for the first four weeks. In week 5 they want 8, and they want 8 for the rest of the game. That is the only thing that ever changes. Nobody except the shop can see it, and even the shop cannot tell whether it will last. Do not hint that it is coming.

The stop, around week 8. The first shop runs out and starts owing beer. Halt every chain and write this up: cases to fill = the new order + what you already owe. Say plainly that what you owe carries forward, keeps charging, and costs double what holding costs. Expect to say it twice, and walk the room to check that teams are actually filling what they owe. This one interruption is the highest-value thing you do all afternoon.

Two more. Tell the room the game is 50 weeks and stop it at 36 — people who can feel the end coming run their shelves down and the last stretch teaches nothing. And do not put “beer game” on the agenda. Anyone who searches the name has the ending in ten seconds. Call it a supply chain exercise.

What the beer game teaches

The wait is the villain, not the people. You order, nothing comes for four weeks, so you order again. The beer you already asked for is on the road where you cannot see it, and it lands on top of everything else you ordered while you waited.
Small changes get bigger up the line. The swing roughly doubles at each step away from the customer. A swing of 4 to 12 cases at the shop counter becomes a swing of nearly 0 to 40 at the factory — from customers who only ever went from 4 to 8.
Owing costs double holding. 50c a case on the shelf against $1 a case you owe. Once a group feels that, the argument about carrying a little cover stops being abstract.
Reacting is expensive. A chain that chases every week usually ends the 36 weeks somewhere between $2,000 and $10,000. A chain that holds its orders near what it actually sells lands around $840. Perfect knowledge of the future gets to about $200.
Nobody up the line was incompetent. Every business acted sensibly on what it could see. That is the sentence the whole exercise exists to earn, and it is why the beer game is still the standard introduction to systems thinking.

Debrief questions, in this order

Ask the first question before you show anybody anything, and write the answers on the board where they will stay all session.

Who or what do you blame for your costs? Bank every answer. You are coming back to this list.
What were you trying to do when you placed your biggest order?
How much beer did you have on the road that you had forgotten about?
When did you first realise you were in trouble, and what could you see at that moment?
Plot every chain’s orders week by week. What shape are they, and who swings hardest?
Now show what customers actually did, for all 36 weeks. Let the room react before you say a word.
Go back to the blame list. Which of those still stands?
What would you have needed to see — not to be told, to see — to do better?
Where in our own work does an order sit for four weeks before anyone acts on it?
Everyone acted sensibly. So why did it still go wrong?

Worth running a second round

If you have the time, play again with the rules relaxed: let the chain see each other’s shelves, or let them talk. Same demand, same delays. The second run is what turns “that was hard” into “and here is what we would change on Monday”.

Honest boundary. This is one product, four businesses and fixed delays. No price changes, no limit on how much the factory can brew, no lost sales, no competitor. It is a teaching model, not an operational one.

Print it and run it at a table

Everything you need on paper, so a printer and a bag of pennies is the whole shopping list. No board to buy.

The Beer Game — printable facilitator guide

The facilitator card. One page: what you need, the table layout seen from above, the six weekly steps, the week 8 stop, and the ten debrief questions.
Four record sheets, one per role. 36 rows, columns in the order the week actually happens, and the cost sum already laid out.
The customer demand deck. Cut-out cards for the shop, plus a STOP card so the group raises a hand instead of asking you.
The table layout. Tape it to the desk: a shelf and two road slots between every pair of businesses.

One email unlocks every card in the free Kaizumi lean game library.

Letter-size, print-ready, readable in black and white.

Beer game FAQ

What is the beer game?

Four businesses sit in a line: the factory, the distributor, the wholesaler, and a shop. Beer moves down the line and orders move up it. An order takes two weeks to reach your supplier and the beer takes two more weeks to arrive, so every decision lands four weeks later. Customers change what they buy once, by a small amount, and orders further up the line still swing wildly. It came out of MIT’s system dynamics group in the 1960s and was written up by John Sterman in 1984.

How long does the beer game take?

Around two and a half hours at a table: 10 to 20 minutes to set up, 60 to 90 minutes to play 36 weeks, and 40 to 90 minutes to debrief. On screens in a room it fits in 60 to 90 minutes. On your own in this browser it takes about 20 minutes. Whatever the format, book the debrief — it is the part that teaches.

How many people do you need?

Four per chain, one person per role. Below four you cannot make the line. Above four, run chains side by side and compare them afterwards — the fact that every chain produces the same shape is half the lesson. One person alone can play the browser version, where the computer runs the other three businesses.

Can I play the beer game online for free?

Yes. The version on this page runs in your browser with no signup and no account. You run the shop at the end of the line for 36 weeks. At the end you get every business’s orders plotted week by week, next to the same 36 weeks played by someone who never panicked.

What are the rules and starting numbers?

Every business starts with 12 cases on the shelf, 4 cases in every slot on the road, and 4 in every slot in the order lane. An order takes 2 weeks to reach your supplier and beer takes 2 weeks to be driven to you, so you wait 4 weeks in total. The factory takes 2 weeks to brew. Beer on the shelf costs 50c a case a week; beer you owe costs $1 a case a week and never goes away until you ship it. A game is 36 weeks. The goal is the lowest total cost across all four businesses, not the lowest cost for you.

Do I have to buy a board to run it?

No. A printed table layout, a couple of hundred counters and a record sheet per player do the same job for about the price of the paper. The printable guide on this page includes the layout, the four record sheets and the demand deck to cut out.

Why do the orders swing so much when customers barely change?

Because of the wait. You order, nothing arrives for four weeks, so you order again. The beer you already asked for is on the road where you cannot see it, and it arrives on top of everything else you ordered while you were waiting. Each business does the same thing to the one above it, so the swing roughly doubles at every step. Small change at the counter, big swing at the factory.

Should I tell people it is called the beer game beforehand?

No. Put it on the agenda as a supply chain exercise. Anyone who searches the name finds the ending in about ten seconds, and the lesson depends on them not knowing what is coming.

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