M&A can often be quite stressful. Sometimes, even the nicest colleagues, the best coffee and the fantastic view from our rooftop terrace cannot take the stress away.

Thankfully, the Munich office has a professional foosball table at our disposable (after lunch of course!) to help clear our heads.

In case we have the honor of meeting you here at our Munich location, here are our house-rules: We always play 2 on 2, Shots from the middle field are strictly forbidden and the first to win two games to three is the winner. By the way, your second win must be by two goals.

What’s at stake: the loser has to make coffee; or has to wipe down the table after our traditional after lunch match.

As with everything here at Aquin, we are very ambitious. In this light, snake-, jet-, and sling-shot-shots are practiced, your defensive reflexes sharpened, or, provided you lost the game, your latte art is fine-tuned. (not entirely voluntarily).

However, these short breaks from the daily grind do a lot of good for us. Apart from the obvious therapeutic benefits such as getting our bodies moving, the stretching of the back and allowing our eyes to focus on something other than the computer screen, foosball does much more. It increases the blood supply to the brain, providing much needed oxygen and energy which in turn allows the brain’s motor cortex (responsible for movement and coordination) and the prefrontal cortex (responsible for logical thinking and planning) to relax.

Brain researcher, Stefan Schneider from the Institute of Movement and Neuroscience at the Cologne Sports University describes this process as follows: »You can think of it like resetting a computer whose memory is overloaded«.

Of course, when the brain starts to overheat again after a long conference call, the busy afternoon silence is occasionally broken by the sounds of the foosball table springing back into action. Sometimes you even must hurry to assure yourself a spot at the table to restart our brain.