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I came across something called Guns and Butter. Apparently it is something Economics/Politics Teachers do to their students in certain schools.
The precise details can be found on the Professor Chaos blog.
Guns and Butter
At one point in my high school government class our teacher, Mr. Blakeman, divided the us up into five groups consisting of four or five people, and each of the groups were to represent different countries. Each was given a 6 x 9 envelope with a letter on it, and inside were three little pieces of paper with a picture of a tank on them (guns), three pieces of paper with a picture of a bushel of wheat (butter), and a lined piece of paper.
The object of Guns and Butter was to amass as much wealth as possible, and I think the way it worked was that the wheat counted as two points and the tanks counted as one. The class proceeded in a series of 10 minute rounds wherein we made alliances, traded for guns or butter, and decided to remain at peace or go to war. Mr. Blakeman would collect all the envelopes and open them one at a time and remove the piece of paper; if country A declared war on country B, he would count the number of tanks in each country’s envelope and whoever had fewer lost everything. Before the next round, each country was given three more tanks and three more bushels of wheat.
Obviously the point was to teach us about balance of power politics, and since it was during the Reagan years one can assume there was a lesson in there about deterrence, and perhaps even a sublime message that spending all your money on guns would not lead to prosperity.
The game started out as you might expect: with five countries it was necessary to form at least two alliances to remain secure, and everyone sought an internal balance of guns and butter so that they could defend themselves but also be in the running to win the game. My friend Rich and I fancied ourselves as smarter than the rest of the class, so we willingly traded away our wheat in favor of tanks and quickly went to war. We knew that we would get more wheat with each round, and we could simply turn on the classmates who had foolishly traded away their defenses in favor of food.
After a few rounds of war on our classmates, they wised up, ceased trading and formed alliances against us. But as it turns out, Rich and I actually were smarter than everyone else. We had behaved like tyrants, and in the final round it was clear that three countries were going to declare war on us and we knew we didn’t have enough tanks to win. So we did what any rational person would: we gave all our weapons to our friend Pete. Mr. Blakeman collected the envelopes, read the declarations of war, and began counting the tanks lined up against us.
But of course when he got to our envelope he found that it was empty. After all these years I can still remember him opening it up and not quite believing that we had none of the arsenal we’d built and used against each of the other countries. Our classmates immediately cried foul, thinking that we’d stashed our tanks in our pockets -- a charge we categorically denied. Each country’s wealth was counted and of course Pete’s country was the victor. My country came in last place with zero wealth, but Mr. Blakeman gave us a sly smile in acknowledgement that we’d beaten the system. We suffered a massive defeat, but we insured that our buddy would win. It was a decisive victory for a coalition of jocks, C students, and slackers over the naive, stupid smart kids who played by the rules. - Professor Chaos