Tethics — The Startup Card Game
Alwyn Tan | Amy Nguyen | Nathan Kong | Samantha Koire
Overview
Tethics is a card game designed to teach business and tech based ethics to aspiring entrepreneurs. We were motivated to design this game because ethics is a big issue in Silicon Valley. Many entrepreneurs are young college-aged students who have grown up reading about billion dollar corporations that started in basements and garages — they aspire to that success. Along with their young age comes a lack of experience. As such, much of what young entrepreneurs view as acceptable, or even standard of business behavior, is what they see in the news about many of those same wildly successful companies…companies that seem to have unending moral mishaps with relatively minor consequences. With this game, we hope to teach those with a dream for their own business how to navigate chance events and difficult grey-zone decisions in a way that won’t bankrupt the fledgling company or ruin its reputation. A difficult task indeed. Building a business requires making many difficult decisions, good timing, luck, and an ability to maintain balanced priorities.
In each game, 4–6 people will decide that they are up for this challenge. The competition and difficult nature of the game will be the driving mechanisms behind the fun to be had. The narrative story guides the players through their own fantasy obstacle courses as they race to come out on top. Strong leaders bring others up with them. Poor ones rise to the top by pushing others down. In order to measure our players’ growth in becoming more ethical business leaders in a world where they are unable to make the “right” decision all the time, we will listen carefully to their comments throughout the game and their initial feedback following play. Do they revel in other players going bankrupt or losing all their reputation points? Do they feel uneasy when they have to make a less-than ideal decision? Do they recommend ways to evade immoral actions, as one play-tester did by advocating for the ability to buy positive action cards if they don’t have any in their hand? Are they engaged in the game or distracted by external conversations and phone messages? Since most players won’t have their own company to apply these learnings to, we hope to have the same players play more than one round of our game so that we can track these behaviors for the same people over time to see if we notice any trends.
Other games on the market that require players to make decisions without full knowledge and risk money in round-based play include Monopoly and Poker. While Monopoly reveals certain inequity and Poker calls for immense skill, our game hopes to strike the perfect middle ground. Not everything is rosy in the world of startups, but with conscious thought and adequate mentorship, one can rise to success. Our biggest fear is that people will think we are simply teaching entrepreneurs that they can do bad actions so long as they can get by. Rather, we are trying to teach them that there will always be difficult decisions that can lead to unfortunate outcomes even when there is no malintent and that reputation has just as much value, or more, than capital. If we removed the negative action cards, this game wouldn’t reflect the real world that we seek to model.
Rules
Goal: Each player has a company they are trying to grow to $1B while maintaining at least 5 reputation points. The first player to do so wins.
Gameplay: Each player starts with $10M, 1 executive, 1 engineering team, 5 action cards, and 5 Reputation points. If a player’s reputation points drop to 0, they lose and is out of the game. Each turn, the players will do the following in order:
- Gain money (# executives * value of engineering units)
- Draw 1 Chance card and play it instantly
- Draw 2 Action cards and play up to 3 Action cards
A player must have 7 or fewer cards at the end of their turn. If a player goes into debt, it gets capped at $0, but they lose a reputation point and their next turn is skipped.
Raising Funding: When a player has enough engineers (coded in green on the revenue stream board), they get the chance to roll a dice (1 roll per turn with max # engineers) to raise their next round of funding. If they roll an even number,
- If Seed: Earn $50M and advance to Series A
- If Series A: Earn $150M and advance to Series B
- If Series B: Earn $300M and advance to Series C
- If Series C: Earn $500M
Number Players: This game is intended for 4–6 players.
Play Time: 45 minutes — 60 minutes
Game Bits
Company Cards:
Money Cards:
Variable Tracker Card:
Action Cards:
- 100 cards, 17 distinct actions
Chance Cards:
- 60 cards, 10 distinct actions
- Categorized by Government, Business, Press, & Legal
Tokens:
- Each player gets 3 tokens to keep track of # of engineers, # of executives, and current funding round (Seed, A, B, or C).
Dice:
- Used to determine the consequence of some action/chance cards
Evolution of Game Cards:
Just like our game evolved, so did the content and look of our game cards. They started as a list of ideas on a Google Doc, became a spreadsheet to improve our ability to balance the game and maintain organization with increasing complexity (multiple funding rounds, categories, etc), evolved to become custom Google Slides to allow for ease of printing, and finally became thematically relevant and polished in Adobe Illustrator.
In our play-tests, we printed single-sided in black and white because it was quick and economical, but for the final draft, we printed in color. While it would be ideal to print on card stock, we weren’t able to accomplish that at the library and prioritized color over card strength. Additionally, as our game evolved, there were more things for each player to keep track of (# executives, # engineers, funding round, etc.), so we designed a master tracker for each player so there would be less cognitive load.
Assessment
Between versions 1 and 2, we modified the learning objective from teaching ethics to teaching how to grow companies through an ethical lens so that the game can better focus on effectively teaching one thing.
Assessment results from post-game interviews:
History
Version 1 (Initial playable prototype tested in class on 1/16)
There were 2 rounds of play with 4 distinct players each round. There was a mix of genders with our target age-range of players (college students).
Key Learnings:
- There needs to be a real “cost” to having a bad reputation. Immediate loss if drop below a certain threshold? Reputation needs to have a more important, more obvious role in the game.
- Is the dominant strategy to act morally? Is it not and that is what mimics the real world? If it is pure chance what cards the user pulls, they don’t have full autonomy over their actions, so how do we judge their moral integrity?
- Is losing from making unethical decisions really modeling the real world? Play-testers specifically noted Facebook and Amazon.
Version 2 (Prototype test in Old Union on 1/20 and play test with our team after)
Changes since Version 1:
- You now lose the game if you fall to 0 reputation points (whereas you don’t lose if you go into debt).
- We added to the lore of the game in our cards so that players feel more invested in trying to act ethically (and like their reputation affects their game). This should also increase engagement with the game.
- We balanced the cards a lot because it took way too long to reach 1 billion and we increased the starting amount of money for each player.
We play tested our game with a 19 year-old Stanford male student studying MCS, a 20-year-old Stanford female student studying Civil Engineering, and a 22-year-old Stanford student studying Computer Science. Next, we play tested within our own team.
Key Learnings:
- No one seemed to have trouble/difficulty learning the rules quickly and accurately
- Patent Approval card was difficult to keep track of for 5 turns
- Some confusion with startup terminology (Series A, B C, when angel investment can occur, etc)
- Action cards were very unethical in general (not well-shuffled?)
- Create a way for players to lower their risk or buy ethical cards?
Version 3: Final Version for our first Hi-Fi Prototype
Final Changes since Version 2:
- Redesigned card deck so that the game mechanic revolved around engineer resources instead of revenue since it became really confusing the difference between revenue and cash and how much to collect/scale by. Adding a tracker for engineers also made it easier to keep track of, since money could be viewed in a chart as opposed to card form. It also made it more visually clear how to raise another round of funding.
- Now skill can get you the opportunity to raise a round of funding, not just the chance cards.
- More of the chance/action cards are positive but require strategy to know when/how to play so that people who don’t want to do anything “sketchy” have more of an ability to do so.
- We eliminated the ability to go into debt because it was really hard for the player to keep track of and calculate mentally and therefore was almost impossible for the other players to be confident the sum was accurate.
- We decided it would be important to print the cards in color for the final draft so that the colors/patterns/visual cues that we designed would have the opportunity to help the players follow the game.
Print-At-Home Kit
- Print these double-sided (action, chance, and money cards)
- Print these single-sided (rules and company/variable tracker cards)
- Get a dice (6 sided)
- Get chits (we use transparent ones on the variable trackers; 3 per player)
Future Work:
- We will add in chance cards that affect people with higher/lower reputation, eg, cards that cause lower reputation cards to lose money, or higher reputation cards to gain money because we need to give more incentive for people to be more ethical.
- Make tracking which companies are partnering with each other easier because it’s hard for other players to know which players are partnered up.
- Adding procedures and important instructions to the side of the variable tracker card for player’s reference (also includes adding the procedure for fund raising) because players kept asking the same questions each round and forgetting to take money.
- Reduce the number of players for a faster pace of game and engagement because some players were bored when it was not their turn.
- Add a new mechanic to discard cards by using an action to discard and draw a new card because we want people to not have to only play bad cards especially if they only have unethical cards.
- Make the cards even more money-like because people loved touching the money cards.
- Reduce the number of money cards because we won’t actually need that many.
