Snowball

Snowball is a financial literacy game made for Zoud GameLab (theme: Make FinLit Fun).

You ski down a mountain from age 22 to 67, seen from above, pushing your savings snowball ahead of you. Money left alone grows 6% a year, so the ball gets bigger on its own, and faster the bigger it is. That is compound growth, felt instead of explained.

• Gold gates are treats (a trip, a phone, a car). They give joy and come out of the snowball. Joy depends on timing, not price: a small treat when you are worn down beats an expensive car when you are fine.
• Blue flags are skills. They raise how much you save every year.
• Storms (car repair, medical bill, job loss) cannot be dodged. Savings cover them; what savings cannot cover goes on a credit card at 24%, which drags the ball and eats your yearly saving first.
• Mood drops every year without a treat. At zero you burn out and splurge anyway, with no joy. Saving everything is not the answer either.

Score = joy along the way + security (the nest egg counts up to a $300k goal and nothing past it, so hoarding scores the same as reaching enough, and retiring in card debt scores negative). At 67 the game prints a receipt of your priciest treat in future money.

What players learn by playing

1. Money invested early has the most years to grow.
2. An emergency fund keeps a storm from becoming high-interest debt.
3. Card debt grows faster than savings and eats the money you meant to save.
4. Balance: treats matter, and a late treat costs far less future money than an early one.

For the jury: concept doc · game budget · source code. 6% is a long-run average for a diversified index fund, not a promise; the money model is tested in tests/econ.test.mjs.

This game contains AI-generated content: the code was written with AI coding assistance. Design, numbers and testing by Design Master Solutions.