Can Games Teach Financial Literacy?

Since it was designed for teenagers, I thought I had better find some to review it. Fortunately, I happen to have a teenager lying around the house, who is an expert in games of all types. Providing appropriate incentives ($100) I got them to invite some friends over, play Hackt!cs, and report on the experience. An abridged version of the review is below.

“In my time playing Hackt!cs, I became a pilot, bought a restaurant, a house, a rental property, had a baby, and spent two years at the beach. Hackt!cs is a board game based around finances in the context of your life. Hackt!cs is a competition in which success is a mixture of various life goals such as starring in a blockbuster film and financial goals such as buying property, owning businesses, and having enough money to retire by your early forties.

Hackt!cs is played over the course of twelve rounds, each supposedly representing two years of life. There’s some basic game mechanics, and some randomness introduced by “Life Happens” cards. Some of these are positive, and others are negative, most of the negative outcomes can be avoided if a player has bought insurance, which is relatively cheap. That’s the whole involvement of insurance in the game. At the end of the game, players add up the total value of their assets and subtract their debts. The amount of money they have is converted into points, some non-financial goals can contribute to winning.

As the four of us (all seventeen to nineteen years old) began our game, we began to notice a few glaring issues with the idea that this game was going to teach us about finance. The first was that none of us ever had to worry about how to make sure we were living somewhere, or what the consequences would be if we ran out of money and couldn’t pay rent. Perhaps this was because we’re all leaving high school and somewhat unsure of where the future will take us, but it felt as though we had more pressing concerns than how we were going to afford to buy a candy shop.