How Strategy Masters was born

Strategy Masters didn't begin with the idea of creating another board game.

It began while I was studying business management.

During one of our lectures, lecturer Mait Ruut talked about the different ways employees contribute to a company — how people can work in the same organisation and even appear to have similar roles, yet have very different effects on the company's results.

I recognised it immediately.

Not because the idea was completely new to me, but because I had already seen it happen in real life.

As an entrepreneur and manager, I had seen how one strong person could improve an entire team. How the wrong person could slow down much more than their own work. How an excellent specialist did not automatically become an excellent manager. And how, as a company grows, the questions of whom to hire, whom to develop and whom to trust with responsibility become increasingly important.

While listening to the lecture, a simple thought appeared:

“Could this be turned into a game?”

Not a game that merely used business as a theme, but one where real management dynamics actually became part of the game system.

The first version was paper and Excel

The first challenge wasn't designing beautiful cards. It was creating the system.

I started developing the basic employee types, their impact on the company, costs, revenue and the decisions a player would need to make while building a business.

The first Strategy Masters cards were simply printed on ordinary A4 paper and cut out by hand. They were thin pieces of printer paper. The company calculations were managed in Excel.

I played the earliest versions with my son. That gave me the fastest possible way to find out whether something that seemed logical in my head actually worked when people started making decisions.

We played. Changed things. Calculated again. Played again.

Some ideas worked immediately. Others had to be removed. And sometimes a seemingly small rule change affected the balance of the entire game.

Gradually, a real system started to emerge.

From paper cards to marker-made prototypes

Once the basic logic had been tested and appeared to work, the prototype became slightly more practical. I bought a pack of ordinary playing cards and wrote the necessary symbols and information on them with a marker.

They still weren't beautiful. But they worked.

By that stage, the question was no longer whether the basic idea could function as a game. The question became how to make the game better, more balanced and more interesting.

Excel continued to evolve alongside the physical game. Eventually, it wasn't simply a spreadsheet running on one computer. The game moved into a web-based Excel environment where players could see the overall state of the game and also follow how competing companies were developing.

The physical cards remained on the table, while more and more of the business mathematics happened digitally.

That combination felt natural. The cards kept people around the same table. The computer handled the calculations nobody wanted to spend the evening doing manually.

Then entrepreneurs started playing it

Once the system had developed far enough, I began playing Strategy Masters with entrepreneur friends and other people close to me.

That was when something particularly interesting started happening. Players with real management or business experience began recognising the situations in the game.

It was the same feeling I had experienced during Mait Ruut's lecture.

If you've worked as an entrepreneur, middle manager, senior manager, supervisor or team leader, there's a good chance you've already experienced some of the situations Strategy Masters creates.

At some point during a game, someone will often say something like:

“I've actually had an employee exactly like this.”

“We made almost this exact mistake in our company.”

“Now I understand why that situation developed the way it did.”

That recognition became one of the most important parts of Strategy Masters.

An experienced manager can connect situations in the game to things they've already seen in real life. A younger or less experienced player can discover many of those same connections in the game before having to learn them the expensive way in a real company.

From Excel to a real application

Over the years, the game kept developing. Eventually it became clear that Excel had done its job. Strategy Masters needed its own system.

Today, every player can use their own device — a phone, tablet or computer. Each player has access to the information and decisions relevant to their own company.

At the same time, the shared game state can be displayed on a larger screen, such as a television using its web browser. That means everyone around the table can immediately see how the different companies are developing and what is happening in the game.

A television isn't required. The shared view can also be opened on a computer, tablet or on each player's own device.

The physical cards are still an important part of Strategy Masters. They create interaction around the table, introduce uncertainty and preserve the feeling of a real game.

The digital system handles the business logic, calculations and shared game state in the background.

Years of development, one core idea

Strategy Masters didn't appear as a finished product. It evolved step by step.

A lecture. An idea. A4 paper cards. Excel. The first games with my son. Ordinary playing cards marked with a pen. A web-based spreadsheet. Games with friends, family and entrepreneurs. Years of decisions about what to change, remove, balance and develop.

And finally, a dedicated web-based game system that every player can access from their own device.

But the central idea has remained essentially the same since the moment it first occurred to me in that classroom:

Business results aren't created by numbers alone. They're created by people, decisions and the system a leader builds around them.

And if you already have experience in management or entrepreneurship, there's a good chance Strategy Masters will eventually give you the same feeling I had during that lecture:

“I've seen this before.”