The new season of Lady Daphne boat trips is underway and this year we are running a new game. Smuggler's Choice involves six smuggling barges, with 250 barrels of rum each, working the waters of the Penrose Archipelago’s 23 rhombus islands.

We designed Smuggler’s Choice so that teams could see, in a relaxed way, how to make tough decisions under uncertainty, how to cooperate, when not to cooperate and how to gather information through negotiation. Smuggler’s Choice illustrates two particular theories - the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Prospect Theory.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is met by teams having to decide whether to cooperate or not!! This has been a fertile research area for games theorists & computer boffins, e.g. the promotion of Tit-for-Tat as the best way to deal with most real-life situations.

Prospect Theory, for which one of the proponents, Daniel Kahneman, won a Nobel prize in 2002, explains how framing problems is crucial. Teams who feel behind tend to take riskier decisions than teams who feel they are in the lead. The first two games proved highly popular with the Blue Beards winning both. Is this a trend??