Fun with other financial bloggers : Debtzilla play-through.

Hanging out with other financial bloggers has always been fun. Some events we had in the past, like a cosy karaoke session we had a week ago, allowed me the privilege to catch a glimpse of financial bloggers having fun. Seeing these folks in action is always rewarding because sometimes you get to see how highly optimized individuals design their lives and their approach towards leisure and problem solving.

So, the word has gone out that the Debtzilla Kickstarter has gone live :

a) Dr Wealth has a detailed description of the game here.
b) If you wish to support the Kickstarter campaign as I have done, here is the link.

We played one session of the upcoming Debtzilla game.

While I had been playing versions of the game at various stages of development, getting to actually play the game with actual game pieces and art-work has been quite a satisfying treat and the game was facilitated very well.

The game is challenging. I'm proud to say that today a group of us financial bloggers took on the game we triumphed over Debtzilla. It's not exactly easy to reach the stage where we can even go toe-to-toe with the monster and the facilitator was quite surprised we actually got this far. Certain aspects of the game was designed to be quite difficult and required a decent amount of interaction and strategic planning between the players to complete the game successfully.

More interesting than the game itself is that the mastermind behind the game Xeo Lye already has a successful Kickstarter campaign called Wongamania under his belt and I expect this second project to do even better than the first.

One aspect of developing financial games is that, historically, it was always believed that a financial game had to trade-off between educational value and fun gameplay. With Wongamania, I was pleasantly surprised that it was able to be both educational and fun. Debtzilla was an attempt to create a more fun and socially interactive experience so it focused only on the aspect of finance concerning debt management. It was also really awesome that financial bloggers can interact with each other and jointly solve a problem together in a fun environment.

I think it's high time for a financial games and education company to make it's mark in the Singapore gaming scene. The maker Capital Gains Studio really has the potential to become the next CMON and perhaps one day I would not just be backing their games on Kickstarter but getting some shares in their IPO in the near future.