Classroom · Game Theory
One day on the ridge, and a choice about what you believe.
A stag needs both of you all day and feeds the village for a week. A hare is two suppers, and you can take one alone, any time. Your class plays it in pairs, twice — the second time when staying loyal actually costs.
- In pairs
- About 30 min
- 2 acts
A practice run with fictional students. No real classroom or join code is created.
Try an answer on the phone. Lead the lesson from the screen.
On their phone
You are presenting
Setting up the room…
Lesson deck
Teach it as a ready-made lesson
Hook, how it works, the live game and takeaways. Edit anything.
Would you bet your dinner?
A ready-to-teach lesson deck: a hook, how it works, the live game and takeaways for the debrief.
6 slides · 1 activity
What it teaches
The stag hunt separates two ideas students usually conflate: the best outcome and the safe one. Hunting the stag together is an equilibrium — nobody gains by leaving it — and it is still risky, because its whole value hangs on the other person showing up. The hare pays the same whatever your partner does. So the choice is not about stags at all; it is about belief, and the room's split between payoff dominance and risk dominance is the lesson standing on the projector.
- Coordination problems
- Risk dominance
- Nash equilibrium
Debrief, while the boards are still up
- 01
What would it have taken to make you stay on the ridge — a promise, a track record, a bigger stag?
- 02
Both of you hunting is an equilibrium and so is both of you taking hares. What makes one of them fragile?
- 03
Where does your team, school or group play a stag hunt — and which equilibrium is it sitting in?
How it works
- 01
Add it to your library
Sign up free and pull the activity from Decka's built-in classroom catalog — one click copies it into your own library, ready to run from Decka or inside PowerPoint.
- 02
Students join by QR
Everyone scans from the projector and plays in their phone's browser. No app, no account, nothing to install.
- 03
You run the room
You move the activity phase by phase: collection closes, the boards resolve on the big screen, and the debrief happens while the results are still up.
What is the stag hunt game?
The stag hunt is Rousseau's game: two hunters can bring down a stag only together, and either can defect to a hare that needs nobody. Unlike the prisoner's dilemma, cooperation here is self-enforcing once you have it — if your partner is on the ridge, your best move is to stay. The problem is getting there. The good equilibrium is payoff-dominant; the cautious one is risk-dominant; and which one a room lands in depends entirely on what its members believe about each other.
That makes it the game to play on the day you want to talk about trust with a structure under the word. Each student's phone offers the ridge or the hare; the projector shows how many stags the room actually brought down and how many were lost to a partner who hedged. Then the second day is harder — being the one who stayed now costs — and the class watches its own confidence be repriced. Teams, alliances and joint projects all live in this matrix; after one playthrough, your students have too.
FAQ
Stag hunt questions, answered
How is this different from the prisoner's dilemma?
In the dilemma, defecting is best no matter what your partner does, so cooperation needs enforcement. In the stag hunt, cooperating IS an equilibrium — if your partner hunts the stag, so should you. Nothing dominates; the hare's payoff simply does not depend on the other player, which turns the whole choice into a question about belief.
What changes in the second round?
The scenario makes the loyal choice genuinely costly when it fails — a harder day, where being the one who stayed on the ridge while your partner took a hare hurts more. Same structure, higher price on trust, and the room gets to see whether its beliefs survived the repricing.
How long does it take?
Two rounds; the saved default shows under the headline as "About N min", and every duration is a setting you control before running it.
Do students need an app or an account?
No. Students scan a QR code from the projector (or open a link) and play in their phone's browser. Nothing to install and nothing to sign up for.
Does it work in PowerPoint or Google Slides?
In PowerPoint, yes: open the Decka add-in on a slide and choose the Classroom tile. Google Slides is not supported yet; there you present from Decka itself. Students play from their phones either way.
How many students can play at once?
Up to 50 participants per live activity on the free plan, 150 on Pro, and 300 on Badass.
More game theory games to run live
- Prisoner's dilemma — two suspects, separate rooms
- Twenty coins, take it or leave it
- Chicken — four seconds on a single-track lane
- Battle of the sexes — one evening, two plans
- Ten rounds in the pot
- Rock, paper, scissors — two rivals and a contract
- Matching pennies — the game where you want opposite things
- All game theory activities
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