Playtest 5, 6 October 2026: I’m standing on the left, still explaining the rules at the table. The same thing the rule book was supposed to do for us.
Brief Overview of SCAMBOO
SCAMBOO is a card game that teaches scam awareness by letting you play the role of the scammer. Players collect Scam Tactic chips and pitch scams at cartoon animal victims, each with a human weakness, explaining out loud why their tactic would work. Every player also hides a Defense Card that can block a scamming attempt, so you are always both attacker and defender. The first player to 10 points wins. For more details, see the scamboo design blog post.
Before this project, I thought a teaching game was mostly a content problem. If we picked the right ten scam tactics and wrote good advice on the cards, the game would teach. Filming our playtests and writing our rule book taught me otherwise.
What the playtest recordings showed
My clearest lesson came from the videos. I timestamped all the recorded playtests so the key moments can be quickly retrieved, and a pattern appeared. We spent most of the first 10 – 12 minutes of the game explaining and answering clarifying questions about the rules of the game (sometimes, this included pre-test). Even when the rule book was present, players would take time to clarify the rules among themselves and still have follow up questions. It looked like the game only worked while I was standing there explaining it, so the rule book wasn’t finished as real life players won’t have me at the table.
Playtest 5 (2 Males, 3 Females). Cards and printed out text-based rule sheet
So I wrote the first two versions of our rule book, which the team then polished together. We started with the rule book being texts on multiple A4 papers and then went on to make it more graphical. I reordered it around a complete example turn and added what players kept asking about, like who goes first. By our last playtest (4 players: 1 male, 3 female), players read the rules and sorted out questions among themselves in about five minutes, and nobody needed me. But the video also showed gaps. For instance, 28 minutes into the recording, players discovered by accident that they could swap chips at the 10-chip limit. They also asked to trade with each other, so trading went into the final version. Best of all was that the playtesters were happy to keep playing after we told them time was up.
Final Playtest: Excited playtesters were able to play the game with minimal additional information needed from the team during the play. The rule book was starting to do its job.
Measuring what the game does
Measuring learning also helped me understand the efficacy of our game. My first pre/post test used a phishing email, a scam voice call and a scam social media post. Most players spotted nearly everything in the pre-test, so there was no room to show improvement. The game wasn’t necessarily failing; my test just couldn’t evaluate sufficiently. A teammate ( “Game”) replaced it with multiple-choice questions. Across 13 participants, average scores rose from 8.03 to 9.73 out of 10 between pre and post test. Using multiple choice questions helped us quantitatively measure knowledge transfer.
My key takeaways
I now consider the rule book and the evaluation of a game to be essential, and not just extra paper work. Going forward, I’ll record every playtest and watch for the moments when a designer has to step in. Each of those moments is a part of the design that isn’t finished yet. Similarly, I now understand better that the design process includes curating a pre/post test that is able to adequately evaluate the defined learning outcomes for the game (if any).
