Group members: Saharat “Game” Laksanasut, Rachel Zhao, Olu Oyetoke, Yuina Iseki
Scamboo! is a 2-5 player card game where you play as a scammer to learn how real scams work and how to stop them. In this blog post, we will walk you through the overview (i.e. the “back-of-the-box” blurb of the game), assessments, history versions of the game, etc. Enjoy!
Overview
Think like a scammer. Learn to defend.
Ever got a text saying your bank account is locked, your car will be tolled, or you’ve won a prize that you have to claim right now? Scammers count on you acting before you think. In Scamboo!, it’s your turn to be the one pulling those strings.
In Scamboo!, 2-5 players of ages 13+ become scammers racing to pull off the most convincing scams on a cast of unsuspecting cartoon animals. Will you rush the Slow Snail with a “decide now!” deadline, or sweet-talk the Lonely Lizard with fake romance? Collect scam tactic chips like Urgency, Authority, Flattery, Fear, and match them to each victim’s weaknesses, then say your scam pitch out loud: “I’m going to scam Slow Snail using Urgency because…”. Make your case, and if no one stops you, the victim is yours.
But watch your back… Every player hides a Defense Card, and your opponents are ready to shut your scam down by naming exactly how they’d protect themselves. Balance chasing the best victims against blocking everyone else’s, collect the right chips before the supply runs dry, and outsmart the table to become the ultimate scammer.
Behind the mischief is a serious goal. Scams work because they exploit ordinary human tendencies: trusting authority, fearing missing out, wanting to be liked. Scamboo! teaches players to recognize ten of the most common scam tactics and pair each one with a defense that works. Because you have to explain why a tactic would fool a particular victim, and how you’d defend against it, you practice the same reasoning you’ll need the next time a suspicious email, call, or message shows up in real life. By the end of the game, you’ll have run every trick in the book, and you’ll know them when someone tries them on you.
Rules
Here is the digital rule book file, and here is a printable PDF version.
GameBits
Game components in Scamboo! consist of 3 types cards (Scammer card, victim card, defense card), wooden scammer tactic chips, a per-player mat, and a shared main board.
Here is an overview PDF of the game bits in Scamboo!.
Assessment
Our assessment focuses on two learning outcomes: (1) recognize the ten most common scam tactics correctly, and (2) respond to each scenario by using defense tactics effectively. We want players to do more than memorize the cards or learn how to win the game. They should understand how scammers exploit people’s vulnerabilities and how to choose an appropriate response.
These goals are built into SCAMBOO!’s mechanics. Players connect Victim Cards with scam tactics, collect Scam Skill chips, and explain their choices using the sentence frame on the cards. For example, they explain why a particular victim might be vulnerable to a certain scam. Other players can then use Defense Cards to stop an attempted scam. Having players explain their reasoning makes their thinking more visible and gives us a better way to observe their understanding.
Our assessment includes a 10-item pre-test and a different 10-item post-test. Each test includes five questions on recognizing scam tactics and five on choosing effective defenses (Table 1). We decided to use different scenarios because our earlier assessment was too easy for some players, who answered nearly everything correctly before playing. This ceiling effect made it difficult to see whether the game supported learning. The new assessment gave players opportunities to apply what they know to different situations.
| Metric | What it measures | Learning outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-test recognition score (5 points) | Players’ ability to recognize scam tactics before playing | Outcome 1 |
| Post-test recognition score (5 points) | Players’ ability to recognize scam tactics in different scenarios | Outcome 1 |
| Pre-/post-test defense scores (5 points each) | Players’ ability to choose effective defenses | Outcome 2 |
| Players’ verbal explanations | How they connect vulnerabilities, scam tactics, and defenses | Both outcomes |
| Playtest observations and player feedback | Where the game supports understanding and where players experience confusion | Both outcomes; informs iteration |
We conducted three rounds of game assessment during playtesting with 13 participants in total: five in the first round, four in the second, and four in the final round. The average pre-test score increased from 7.8 to 9.2 in the first round, from 8.0 to 10 in the second, and from 8.2 to 10 in the final round. Across all three rounds, the average increased from 8.03/10 to 9.73/10, a gain of 1.70 points. All participants scored higher on the post-test (Figure 1).
History Versions of Game: From MDAO Design to Learning-Centered Iteration
Scamboo! began with a simple idea: if you want people to spot a scam, let them run one. Players are rival scammers trying to “scam” cartoon animal victims, and each has a hidden Defense Card to sabotage the others. Our learning goal never changed: players should recognize common scam tactics and match each one with a defense that works. What changed a lot was where that learning happened. In earlier versions, the lessons sat in printed text that players could ignore and still win. Over time, we created moments where players internalize these lessons to score points, so that recognizing a scam tactic became embedded in the play rather than something added on top. Throughout the design process, we continuously wanted to achieve three goals: making the game fun, keeping the rules manageable, and helping players recognize how psychological manipulation works in scams.
Version 1: The Concept
Our first concept was a card game for 2 – 5 players aged 13+, built on two kinds of fun: fantasy (getting to be the villain) and challenge (balancing your own scams with blocking everyone else’s). We drew inspiration from Fluxx and Splendor, particularly the latter’s resource-collection mechanics. We developed ten scam tactics (Urgency, Authority, Scarcity, Reciprocity, Fear, False Identity, Money Reward, Flattery, Social Proof, and Secrecy) as chips, which players would collect and use in combinations to target victims with matching vulnerabilities.
Each Victim Card started as a human persona (e.g. a grandma, young school student, immigrant) with a weakness, such as difficulty using technology or fear of missing school deadlines.
In cross-team reviews in class, we received feedback that using real human personas risked reinforcing ageist and racial stereotypes about the groups involved, which we addressed in our next iteration.
Version 2: First Playable Prototype
We fleshed out the three main types of cards in addition to the 10 scam tactic chips:
- Scammer Cards: Different (non-human) scammer identities with specialized tactics.
- Victim Cards: Animal characters with unique personalities, vulnerabilities, score values, and a dice number
- Defense Cards: One Defense Card could counter several scam tactics.
Cute Animal Victim Cards
Our victim card personas were switched to animals. Each animal’s name described its weakness, such as a “slow” snail or “lonely” lizard, and listed the scam tactics needed to exploit that weakness, and the defense that counters it. At this stage, many rules were still experimental, particularly how players could collaborate to stop each other from scoring.
Die or no Die?
We also considered adding a die: to scam a victim, a player had to “roll ≥ y,” with y printed on the card. We hoped this would add uncertainty and thrill, but it raised a key question: how much should the outcome depend on strategy versus luck? We tested victim cards with and without dice requirements internally and found the die made results rely too heavily on chance. That weakened the challenge aesthetic we were aiming for — the feeling of winning through skill — since a well-reasoned scam could still fail on a bad roll. So we removed the die, which also simplified each turn.
Strength of Defense Cards
Originally, one Defense Card could counter several tactics (up to four), which made defenses too powerful and hard to remember. We explored limiting each card to two tactics and reducing a defense from blocking the whole attack to removing one matching chip.
The resulting dynamics were like a set-collection game. Players collected scam tactic chips, and each victim card printed the exact skill icons needed to take it, so a turn was mostly “do my chips match these icons?” Each player held a defense card that could cancel an attack, and a successful block deducted points from the attacker. Scammer profile cards gave players permanent scam tactics, and the card designs weren’t color-coded, but rather brightly colored.
We tested our game in class on October 5th and with five outside players on October 6th. Everyone liked the game, but the feedback was consistent and humbling 🙂:
- Too much to learn at once
- Icons beat text. Players didn’t need to read any of the educational text; they just looked for matching icons.
- It felt like an existing game (Splendor)
- Cards were hard to distinguish (all cards brightly colored, but not color coded)
The icon problem was our most significant insight. Our mechanic of having printed icons on cards produced a pure pattern-matching dynamic which bypassed our intended outcome of learning about scamming. We had assumed that putting educational information on game components would naturally encourage learning; instead, we learned that players only learned what the mechanics rewarded.
Version 3: Making Players Think
Version 3 was our biggest redesign, and nearly every change answered a specific piece of feedback or playtest moment.
- Hidden tactics: We removed the required skills from the victim cards. Players now had to read the victim’s weakness and work out which tactics would exploit it. This was a direct fix for the icon-matching problem.
- Say it out loud: To attempt a scam, you now had to explain it. Instead of just naming the scam tactics like “Flattery and False Identity”, players would say “Lonely Lizard desperately wants a relationship, so I’d pose as a romantic interest and flatter them”. Defenders also had to name their defense aloud. This brought back the role-play, strengthening the fantasy aesthetic, and it made players connect tactics to weakness in their own words, which is the skill we actually want them to learn.
- Blocks became simple: No more point deductions. A valid Defense Card stops the whole scam. The victim goes back and is replaced, the attacker’s turn ends, and the defender draws a new card.
- Chip limit: One player from a playtesting had a strategy to get all of the scam tactic chips, so that no one else could attempt scams – this made the game not enjoyable for these other players. To stop scam chips being drained from the supply, we capped players at 10 chips. A player at the limit can still collect, then hand back any chips they choose, so the cap both prevents hoarding and lets players swap out useless chips.
- Rebalanced tactics: Some tactics appeared repeatedly while others were rarely represented. Beyond the gameplay imbalance, players might mistakenly think that certain scam techniques were universally more important simply because they appeared more frequently in the deck. We redistributed vulnerabilities across Victim and Scammer Cards so all ten tactics appeared more evenly.
The in-class playtest on October 7th revealed that we had overcorrected – we had made the game too complex. Hiding scam tactics on victim cards significantly slowed down the pace of the game, interrupting the momentum of resource collection and strategic competition. What initially seemed like a promising way to deepen learning had ultimately made the gameplay feel less fluid and engaging. It was difficult for anyone to win. Previous playtests had a game winner between 20 to 35 minutes; this time, playtest time ended with only a few players holding a few points.
This iteration revealed an important tension in serious game design: making learning activities more explicit does not necessarily make the overall learning experience better. We needed to find a way to encourage meaningful reasoning about scam tactics without turning every turn into a lengthy reading-comprehension exercise.
Version 4: Where we are at
Based on the feedback we got from the in-class playtest on October 7th and lecture content on information design in games, we decided to focus this iteration on a clearer visual language. Each card type got its label (e.g. “defense card”) on both sides, decks got distinct back designs, and distracting background colors were removed. Scammer cards became dark and villainous, each type of card was color-coded (e.g. defense cards are blue), victim characters sat on plain and simple backgrounds, and player mats gave every player a rules reminder within reach. In response to feedback, we also reordered the rules to make them clearer for a first-time player: the objective, then the pieces, then how to play, then what happens, then a complete example flowchart.
Our most recent version reverses one of our own Version 3 decisions. Each new Victim Card shows its vulnerabilities as icons again, along with how many of each tactic chip a scam needs. A one-word trait (e.g., “Slow” snail), a short quote in the victim’s voice (e.g. “Wait… what just happened”), and a character description (e.g. Takes a while to notice what is going on) hint at why those tactics work. A sentence frame then turns that into the spoken explanation: “I’m going to scam Slow Snail using Urgency because this victim takes a long time to process their surroundings – if I urge him to “decide now!” he becomes overwhelmed and acts before catching on.” In version 3, hiding the tactics had made players read, but it also made scoring feel like guesswork – and balancing luck against strategy had been our concern from the start. Now, in version 4, visible icons restored the flow and speed of the game with fast matching, while the sentence frame keeps the reasoning out loud.
All in all, we learned that balancing learning, gameplay flow, and defensive power is an important challenge in game design. Players learn what the mechanics reward, so the lesson has to live inside the action. In this final version of the game, we were finally able to make the action that wins the game and the skill we want players to learn one and the same: explaining why a scam would work on a particular victim.
Photos/Video Clips of Game Testing
Final Box Design for Scamboo!
Link to a “Print at Home” Version (PDF)
If you’re interested in playing Scamboo!, first of all, yipee! Second of all, here is a Print-at-home PDF version where you can print the assets at home and play the games for yourself 🙂
