You are the CEO of a major multinational insurance company known for your steely nerve, snap judgement and good, good looks. They are your competitors and every bit as stone cold sharp as you are. But times are changing, to continue to survive in this jungle of an international insurance market, you also need to change – either merge with one of your competitors or buy the poor sods. Is this real life…you better believe it is:

Welcome to Magamé – The Mergers & Acquisitions Game (Global Edition).

Rather than focusing on everyday actuarial intricacies, we want you to take a step back and think about the bigger picture – what it means to make strategic decisions which have the potential to create (or lose) value for the company you run. You will be given a packet of information prepared by your crack actuarial staff which presents detailed valuations of your competitors. But don’t sweat too much, for the more “visual” CEOs, you will also be given some pretty graphs and pictures which make those actuarial valuations understandable. With these valuations, some cash in your pocket and a bit of insider information about your company, you will have to approach your frienemies and negotiate an acceptable deal.

The winner is that company which adds the most value to their company through M&A activity.

And to make this as interesting as possible, all teams will represent a real company covering a wide range of geographies and sizes; and all financials will be real financials pulled from publicly available returns.

So good luck, your shareholders are counting on you.

(1) People – When we played the game before, we had 10 teams with 3-5 people per team. We could easily expand that to 15-20+ teams if need be.

(2) Timing – We previously played it during a 60 minute period. So 90 minutes would be fine and more reasonable.

(3) Number of Games – We could easily run a number of games simultaneously. I signed up 1 co-presenter so we could run 2 games simultaneously (although with 50 people it might be more manageable with 2 moderators per game). We could also add more co-presenters to run more games simultaneously or run games over multiple time slots.

(4) PC vs. Life Companies – I created the game using only P&C companies, but we could easily do a game with life insurance companies.