Stick Game Expands to Include Branches of Government

In a recent session of The Stick game, a student came and told me that he thought there needed to be a court.  "Why?" I asked. "There is no one violating any rules.  They still wanted to set something up that gave them something to do and took some power away from me.
"What about a student government that decided on the laws instead of you?" Came a suggestion from the group.

So that's what they did.  They created a small, 5 person, lawmaking body that consisted of one member from each table.  Every time a law was proposed, the person proposing the law would give the money to me and tell their law to the council.  The council would then argue the validity of the law amongst themselves, sometimes making changes with the consent of the proposer, and decide whether the law should be passed.  If someone didn't agree, they could still pay 4 sticks to bring it to the whole class for a vote.

This was working fine until the next session where there was an argument regarding a law about stealing sticks.  The argument was immense.  The kid that initially asked for a court, looked at me and said, "I told you we needed a court, Spencer."  So a court was created.  They elected 3 students to a "Supreme Court".  One of the students was a defendant on the initial argument, so he had to recuse himself.  The next court case was regarding a law that said that one has to know the answer to a question before they pay the stick to answer it.  The plaintiff in this case won the case and had to split the sticks with the person that originally won them.  The defendant, seeing his bounty cut in half complained that he lost the case due to favoritism.  Two of the supreme court justices were from the same table as the plaintiff.  He proposed that the supreme court justices should all be from different table so that one table will not have all of the power.  This inspired an intense debate.  The people had elected these individuals, did they not trust them to make objective decisions?  We wouldn't have to worry about it if they were all from different tables.  What if we end up voting the same people back in, will people stop fighting this?  There was yelling and some tears.  It was magical.  They ended up electing 3 individuals from different tables. Whew!

During this process we discussed the American branches of government and some of the differences and similarities between that and our stick game.  I didn't want to give them too many ideas because I wanted them to innovate new solutions, not model them.