Why fictional towns?
I borrowed from four traditions when I built Awesomeville, and each one shows up somewhere specific in play.
Design thinking
Start with a community and its needs, not with a product. Players never begin with a business idea. They begin with a town, and the town tells them what's worth building.
Lean startup
Build, hit a disruption, pivot. The face-down Wildcard is a market shock squeezed into one card. It's the moment every real venture meets, and it lands mid-build, right when the team is most attached to their plan.
Challenge-based learning
Constraints get ideas going. They don't shut them down. The Bylaw card is a business requirement teams build with from the start, and the strange town quirks turn every solution into a workaround worth explaining.
Psychological safety in learning
The towns are fictional on purpose. When the town isn't real, no answer can be wrong, and that is what makes room for the kind of wide-open thinking entrepreneurship actually needs.
Students who won't risk a wrong answer about the real world will happily pitch a mosquito-control startup to a town of frog royalty.
That's not a gimmick. That's the whole point. The imaginary setting drops the social cost of being wrong to zero, which is why the quiet students start talking, usually within the first ten minutes.
Curious what a session looks like in practice? See For Educators for outcomes, timelines, and assessment, or try the two-minute demo.