For this week’s Poker Night, we decided to give poker a rest and try a different diversion: Burn Rate, the “Game of Dot-Com Failure”. The idea is to dump bad employees and bad ideas on your opponents while keeping your company’s burn rate as low as possible. The last person to run completely out of money wins.

The game started promising enough. Justin got saddled with a horrendous Bad Idea (instant product delivery by bicycle) that he just couldn’t manage to get rid of. He tried to mitigate the problem by building up his engineering department, but it was too little, too late. Page, true to form as an employee of the City of San Jose, built an enormous multi-layered organization and gave them very little to do. He also bled away fairly quickly.

That left me and Jason. I had a good start by poaching some top VPs early on, but my quick lead made me a target, and unfortunately I neglected my Sales department. That made me vulnerable to numerous Bad Ideas, and I was forced to hire numerous contractors, quickly depleting my cash reserves. Meanwhile, Jay was running a lean operation, and he slowly ate away at my talent. My Development VP got replaced by a complete incompetent, and I was unable to release any of my products.

For a while I stayed afloat with some amazing funding courtesy of my brilliant Finance VP, but eventually I lost him too. Things were looking grim, but I managed to fire my incompetent Development VP and beat up Jay with a few moves of my own. It was down to the wire. But lucky Jay — in a last-ditch effort, he managed to lay off all his non-essential personnel. I went out of business the next turn, and Jay survived with a mere $1 million in the bank.

So I guess I’m not the best dot-com CEO. That’s OK. I’m not the best member of the Planning Commission either, as our forays into Downtown have proven. Lord help me if Jan and Justin flesh out their idea for their even more true-to-life game: Staff Meeting: The Game of Meetings. Actually, Lord help us all.