Currently, most students studying agricultural economics and agribusiness at universities come from nonagricultural backgrounds. Without firsthand experience, instructors must find avenues to engage them with abstract concepts through experiential learning. Cooperative learning and simulation games are effective tools for modeling the complex economic decision-making challenges faced by producers, especially smallholder farmers in developing countries. In this study, we explore students’ experiences after playing the Green Revolution Game (GRG), a simulation game that places them in the role of a smallholder farming family in a rural Indian village. Through a content analysis of 62 reflection papers written by undergraduate students over 3 years in an agribusiness course focused on international agricultural development, we examine how students operationalized course concepts through the GRG to understand the complexity of smallholder decision-making. Emerging themes from students’ reflections, analyzed through Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory and Game Theory, demonstrate that the GRG enhanced their understanding of concepts such as resource allocation, poverty traps, technology adoption, risks and uncertainty, and market dynamics in agricultural development. We recommend this and other simulation-based games to help students better grasp course concepts and cultivate higher-order thinking, problem-solving, and high-impact learning.

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