The Russian language version of THE FARMING GAME®

After the collapse of the former U.S.S.R. in 1992, the West invested billions of dollars in attempts to help their former enemy transform their command economy to a market economy. THE FARMING GAME played a tiny part in the effort. In 1994 the World Bank contacted George Rohrbacher with a very interesting proposal. They asked him to come to Russia and oversee the translation of THE FARMING GAME into Russian. They believed our game would be useful as a training tool for newly privatized farmers. Our game was a sort of market economy in a box, a start-up business model for a new way of looking at farming in the post-Soviet era.

In the fall of 1994, George arrived in Moscow and then boarded a train for Nizhney Novograd, a city on the Volga River 600 miles to the east. Nizhney, prior to 1992, had been a closed city due to its munitions works, but in 1994 it was the hub of the national privatization effort. The first six collective farms privatized in the whole country where in the vicinity of Nizhney and they were to serve as the real-life laboratories to test-play a translated version of THE FARMING GAME. A translation team comprised of a Russian agronomist, a Russian linguist, a Russian sociologist, a Russian lawyer, an American linguist and George Rohrbacher, an American farmer and “the little old game inventor,” completed a rough translation of THE FARMING GAME in two long days in the World Bank office in Nizhney. They then took it out to the field and test-played it, brought it back to the office and tuned the game up some more, then back out to the field, then back to the office, then back to the field… tuning and adjusting the game until the team got the game and all its nuisances right. Features on the front page of the Wall Street Journal Europe, an Associate Press article and a piece on NBC Evening News chronicled these efforts.

George Rohrbacher has been invited to lecture at Moscow State University and many agricultural technical schools in central Russia on the educational uses of THE FARMING GAME. The game has also seen use in the Ukraine, Armenia and Ingshetia, all former parts of the U.S.S.R., where the game has taught accounting, business principles and entrepreneuring plus being the source of many hours of good clean fun.