Management games are gaining more and more importance in today's workplaces. They not only provide a respite from daily work but also help to imbibe within the players a complex concept without the use of the lecture method of teaching and with the help of fun element added in the game. They have now crossed the boundaries of organizations (where they used to be played primarily) and are now used in educational institutes like Business Schools to make the students acquainted with concepts that are difficult to explain, unless experienced. This article speaks about the origin of management games, the use of management games and the steps in conducting a game along with its advantages and disadvantages.

Management games taken up in the workplace try to create off the job situations to facilitate the processes of planning, experiencing and controlling any particular activity. In case of educational institutes, the management games are used to facilitate students' understanding of a particular concept. A management game can be defined as:

A dynamic teaching device which uses sequential nature of decisions, within a scenario simulating selected features of a managerial environment, as an integral feature of its construction and operation (Lloyd, 1978).

Though the use of management games has started around 50 years, the use of games as a learning tool is centuries old. The first game was developed in China around 3000 BC called by the name `Wei-Hai', it was used for learning war tactics as well as for entertainment. Around the same time the game `Chaturanga' was developed in India which was also a war game. War games were taken seriously after the development of the `Kings Game' by Weikhmann in Germany in 1664. The Germans continued to come up with war games like `War Chess' in 1780 and an elaborate "Krigspeil" in 1798. The first management game of the world can be credited to Marie Bernstein. At the Leningrad Institute of Engineering and Economics, she developed some games to train shop workers for management positions in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The American Management Association (AMA) was the main force behind popularizing business games in the US in the 1950s. The AMA used computer based simulations its Executive Development Programs in the mid 1950s. This was followed by the UK, where the use of business games was popularized in organizations such as Management Games Limited by people like D Lloyd in 1963. Since then the application of business games have been steadily increasing. Though the proliferation to countries outside the US and the UK was slow but those countries are coming up with newer and innovative uses of games.

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