ABOUT BOUNTY BAY
Negotiation is everywhere. Practicing it isn’t.
We negotiate constantly—over money, contracts, priorities, responsibilities, relationships and scarce resources. Yet deliberate practice is surprisingly rare. Most negotiations happen for real, with real consequences, and no opportunity to replay the same decision differently. Bounty Bay was built to create that practice ground.
Start with the fundamentals
Negotiation is bigger than bargaining. Real negotiations can involve multiple issues, competing interests, relationships, coalitions, information asymmetries and opportunities to create value. Bounty Bay starts somewhere more fundamental: bargaining over a single issue. You have a limit. So does the other side. Neither knows the other’s. Somewhere between those limits, a deal may exist. That strips the situation down to some of the most consequential decisions at the table: Where do you open? How do you respond? When do you concede? What information do you reveal? What can you learn from the other side? How much value can you capture without losing the deal? Because the game knows both sides’ hidden limits, it can reveal something real negotiations usually cannot: what deal was actually available.
A deal is not the same as a good deal
Reaching agreement does not necessarily mean you bargained well. Walking away does not necessarily mean you bargained badly. After a match, Bounty Bay can reconstruct the bargaining range, the offers that were exchanged and the value ultimately captured by each side. It can then examine observable behaviour—offers, concessions, timing, questions and communication—and connect those patterns to established ideas from negotiation research.
The game knows what you did. Not who you are.
Bounty Bay does not diagnose personalities, and a single score does not claim to measure someone’s overall ability as a negotiator. It measures what happened in a particular negotiation.
Built from practice and research
Bounty Bay is informed by years of work in negotiation training, coaching, simulation design and applied research, across diplomatic, public-sector, international and postgraduate settings. That experience repeatedly points to the same problem: Negotiation is much easier to explain than it is to practice. Frameworks can be taught. Concepts can be understood. Cases can be discussed. But skill develops through making decisions under uncertainty, seeing what those decisions produced, and getting another chance to try. Bounty Bay turns that cycle into the product: Play. Reveal. Understand. Play again. Its feedback combines observable match data with concepts drawn from negotiation research. Research is used to help interpret behaviour—not to manufacture certainty where none exists.
From bargaining to negotiation
Single-issue bargaining is the starting point, not the destination. Bounty Bay is being developed toward richer negotiation environments involving real-world information, preparation, asymmetric information and eventually multiple issues. As the game develops, the challenge changes. It becomes less about simply dividing value and more about: discovering priorities, testing assumptions, exchanging information, making conditional trades, constructing packages and creating value before deciding how to divide it. That progression is deliberate. First, learn to claim value. Then learn to create it.
A game first
Bounty Bay is not designed to recreate another classroom, workshop or conference room. The objects can be absurd. The opponents can be unpredictable. The situations can be ridiculous. The decisions underneath them aren’t. The aim is simple: make serious negotiation practice something people actually want to do again. Not another negotiation course. A negotiation game.
WHY BOUNTY BAY?
Because negotiation has enough conference rooms already.
SKILL PAYS.
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