Set the price for your drink stand against the day's weather, watch the demand curve respond live, and hunt the price where profit peaks.
Each day brings weather (a sky, a temperature and an event such as a street fair or a spike in lemon prices) and a cost for every cup you sell. Slide the price between $0 and $6, in 5-cent steps. The chart shows how many cups sell at each price: raise the price and fewer cups sell, lower it and you sell more but earn less on each. The shaded box is your revenue, price times cups, and the readouts show cups, revenue and profit (revenue minus the cost of the cups).
When you are happy with the price, click Open the Stand to sell. The result card shows your profit, the best profit possible that day and the price that earns it. Your score is your profit as a share of that best profit, out of 1,000.
Suppose 100 cups would sell at a price of $0, each extra dollar loses 20 cups, and each cup costs you 50 cents. At $2.00 you sell 60 cups: $120 revenue, $30 of cups, $90 profit. The dashed line sits at $2.50, where revenue is biggest ($125 from 50 cups, $100 profit). But the best price is $2.75: 45 cups, $123.75 revenue, $22.50 of cups and $101.25 profit, a perfect 1,000. So $2.00 scores 889 and $2.50 scores 988.
In Versus on the same day, the computer's stand across the street opens at $1.65. Charge the $2.75 that was best on your own and customers cross the street: you sell half a cup. Match its $1.65 and you each sell 33.5 cups for $38.53 profit. Undercut to $1.50 and you sell 38 cups for $38.00 profit while the computer's profit drops to $35.07, so you win the day but earn less than by matching, and tomorrow the computer replies with $1.60.
Pour Decisions turns the demand curve into something you can move, so the trade-off between price and sales is felt rather than memorised, and Versus shows why competition pushes prices down.
Demand curves were first drawn by the French mathematician Augustin Cournot in 1838, and Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics (1890) popularised the supply-and-demand diagram, putting price on the vertical axis, a convention textbooks still follow (supply and demand: history). Pour Decisions puts price along the bottom instead, because it is the thing you control. How far sales fall when the price rises is called the price elasticity of demand.
The drink stand comes from a classic of educational computing: Lemonade Stand, written by Bob Jamison of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium in 1973, in which players set the price per glass, the glasses to make and the advertising signs over 12 days, guided by a weather forecast.
Versus comes from a famous argument. In 1883 Joseph Bertrand, reviewing Cournot's book, pointed out that rival sellers compete on price, and in the simplest version two sellers are enough to drive the price down to cost, the "Bertrand paradox". When customers do not all switch to the cheaper seller, for example because the stands sit in different places, prices stay above cost (Bertrand competition). Pour Decisions uses that version: the cheaper stand wins some of its rival's customers, not all of them.
Pour Decisions is an original PlayPendium game. It grew from one idea: the demand curve in a textbook is a still picture, but pricing is a slider you push until profit stops rising. Runs take a minute or two, need no install or account, and the Daily is the same for everyone.