Bank. Most teams are banks. You choose how much to borrow and where to put the money. Your objective is to still be standing at the end of round 6 with more equity than you started with.
ECB. One team. You set the base rate, a ceiling on brown holdings, and a floor on green holdings, for every bank at once. You have three targets and they pull against each other.
Government. One team. You choose bond returns, bond amounts, and carbon taxes. You also decide how much adaptation spending to fund. You are trying to finish adaptation without breaking the debt ceiling or missing a repayment.
Leverage. How much you borrow against your equity. The limit depends on how brown your portfolio is: a browner book gets a lower limit. Borrowing costs the base rate plus 0.6%.
Allocation. How your assets split across the six instruments: green bond and green equity (the green block), deposit, conventional bond and medium equity (the neutral block), and brown equity (the brown block). Your allocation must add to 100%.
Green bonds only exist from round 4.
Base rate: 0.0% to 5.0%. One rate, three jobs: it is what you earn on deposits, it sets what banks pay to borrow, and it sits underneath every asset price.
Brown ceiling: 10.0% to 100.0%. The most any single bank may hold in the brown block.
Green floor: 0.0% to 50.0%. The least any single bank must hold in the green block.
Tightening a limit gives banks one round of grace before a breach counts.
Return on each bond: 0.0% to 15.0%. Bonds repay next round, with the return you offer. Banks decide whether to buy at that return.
Amount issued: capped at 1.5x your funding need for the round. Bond supply is capped; equity supply is not.
Carbon tax: 0.0% to 25.0%. It reduces the brown firm's payout to its holders.
Adaptation spending: any amount you can fund. Finishing adaptation costs 580 in total. Green bond proceeds can only be spent on adaptation.
Debt ceiling: 290.
Three things move a price, and nothing else.
One: the pull towards fundamental value. Every asset has a value implied by the payout it is expected to make and the interest rate it is discounted at. When the base rate goes up, every fundamental value falls. Prices drift towards that value each round rather than jumping to it.
Two: net demand. If the room puts more money into an asset than it did last round, the price rises; if the room pulls money out, it falls. This is why an asset can be cheap on fundamentals and still fall, and why the room can talk itself into a bubble.
Three: scripted news. Each round has one event, the same in every session. Events can knock a price down on the spot and can permanently change what a firm pays out.
There is no fixed greenium in this game. Any gap between green and conventional bond pricing is whatever the room's own demand produces.
Green firms grow fastest, but initially pay investors less. Returns also depend on changes in their share prices.
Strong funding supports growth; weak funding slows it. GDP measures the whole economy.
A bank fails when losses wipe out its equity: the moment its equity reaches zero.
A failed bank is not removed from the game. It keeps making decisions in shadow mode: it can still trade, but its orders no longer move prices, no longer fund the government, and no longer count towards the ECB's aggregates. Its portfolio is dumped on the market, which pushes prices down for everyone still standing.
The lecturer can restore a failed bank's equity: that is what a bailout looks like here.
Holding more brown than the ceiling, or less green than the floor, puts you in breach. Breaches are shown in red and the non-compliant range is shaded on your allocation control.
If the ECB tightens a limit and your existing book is suddenly outside it, you get one round of grace to get back inside.
Transition risk is the risk that policy or sentiment turns against carbon: the value falls because the world decided it should. Physical risk is the risk that the weather does the damage directly.
If a disaster comes, how bad it is depends on how brown the system was on average, not just in that round. Adaptation spending done beforehand reduces the relief bill that lands on the government.
No more than 12.0% of banks fail.
Total system assets stay above 70.0% of their round-1 level: the ECB is not supposed to strangle lending to hit its other targets.
System brown share is below 20.0% by the final round.
All three at once. Two out of three is not a pass.
Adaptation reaches 100%.
Debt stays below the ceiling of 290.
No missed bond repayment. A missed repayment is scored, and the room will see it.
Leverage: borrowing to hold more assets than your equity alone would buy. It multiplies gains and losses equally; a 4x levered bank loses all its equity on a 25% fall in its assets.
Bond return: the interest a bond pays. Government sets this return before banks trade. Bonds repay next round, including principal and interest.
Greenium: the premium investors pay for a green bond, so the issuer can offer a lower return than on an otherwise identical conventional bond. Nothing in this game grants one: if a greenium appears it is because the room bid it into existence.
Stranded assets: assets that lose their value not because they stopped working but because policy, technology or sentiment moved against them. The brown firm is the candidate here.
Physical risk: losses from the climate itself: storms, floods, heat.
Transition risk: losses from the move away from carbon: carbon prices, regulation, changing preferences.
Adaptation: spending that reduces the damage a disaster does when it arrives. It does not stop the disaster; it lowers the bill.
Shadow mode: how a failed bank keeps playing: decisions still made, but with no effect on prices, government funding or ECB aggregates.
What we collect. Your team name and every action your team takes during the game, investment choices, policy settings, and the results that follow. We do not collect your name, student number, or contact details. Please choose a team name that doesn't identify anyone.
Why. To analyse the game in class and in tutorials, and to improve how it is taught.
How it is stored. Securely by the module lecturer, on university-managed systems. Team names are replaced with a random identifier before any analysis.
Sharing. The pseudonymised dataset, random identifiers only, no team names, may be shared with other researchers for educational research in future.
How long we keep it. [retention period] after the end of the module, after which it is deleted.
Your rights. You can ask to see your team's data, or to have it removed, at any time and without giving a reason, just tell the lecturer. Removal will not affect your mark in any way.
Contact. [lecturer name and email]. [University] is the data controller; its data protection officer can be reached at [DPO contact].