The Search for the Lost Dutchman′s Gold Mine

As described by Dr. Scott Simmerman, the publisher:

Lost Dutchman is a well-designed team building game that focuses on collaboration, leadership and engagement. It is designed to be facilitated by a trainer or consultant interested in generating discussions about the organizational culture and framed around desired outcomes. It comes with extensive debriefing ideas. It is a business simulation but useful for schools and other organizations looking to improve collaboration.

It is normally played with 5 / 6 people on a team, with 3 to a 100+ teams. It can play with as few as 6 people but the design works much better with 12 or more. It is proven to scale up really well for large group events of 150 to 250 or more people.

Dutchman is designed for large team building / strategic planning events but works well for small group classroom training situations. We sell versions for different size groups.

The Design:

The challenge is to collaborate, rather than to compete, and to share resources and do sufficient planning to optimize overall results. The reality is that teams often choose to compete, thus making choices that sub-optimize results.

Components include a colorful map, a Grub Stake of resource cards, planning tools, job aids and other information about the game and the goals. Putting on cowboy hats and bandannas, the group settles in to briefly hear the history of the Lost Dutchman's Mine and to learn the mechanics of the challenge.

The team is given 20 days of 2 minutes each to manage their journey to the mine and back home to Apache Junction. They can choose from 3 paths with different risks, planning for weather changes and focusing on the optimal use of resources. Teams are given the opportunity to gain additional information valuable to their journey's success but must decide if they are willing to delay their start by one or two days in order to obtain this information. After being given the introductory information, the team has 15 minutes to plan. They must work together to make decisions about tactics, resource management, direction and risk.

The 20 days of play (roughly 35 minutes) begin and are marked by lots of lively interaction among players and teams in the spirit of collaboration and competition. During this time, they'll discover the impact of their early decisions on their results. They can choose to get advice or collaborate with others.

The goal is to get to the mine, mine as much gold as WE can, and return to Apache Junction. All teams are successful, but the ones that plan and collaborate will optimize their results. Debriefing can focus on collaboration, planning, leadership, motivation, optimization of organizational performance results and many other themes.