Work / Products and games
Kleptocrat: How to Hide Dirty Money
A mobile strategy game about how corrupt officials steal and launder public money, built from patterns in real investigations.
Kleptocrat started as an idea of Jim Mintz, founder of the Mintz Group. Our investigators kept seeing the same moves in cases involving corrupt officials: how they got the money, how they hid it, and how they got caught. The question was whether a game could teach those patterns better than a report could.
Early prototypes
We broke the real stories into acts and built a small database of strategies, actions, and downfalls. The first prototype was a printed card game: 20 decks of 84 cards each, play-tested at the company conference in November 2014.
The feedback was clear. Players didn’t want to read that much text, and the scoring needed more gradation.
Game design
We brought in BumbleBear Games, led by Josh DeBonis, to design and build the game with us. We kept the cards but moved them onto a gridded board. The mechanics came out of the real patterns. We added indicators of risk and an element of chance.
The app
After months of play-testing and focus groups, Kleptocrat launched free on the App Store in September 2017. By October 2024 it had been downloaded more than 10,400 times, with an average rating of 4.8 stars.
Reception
Kleptocrat won the IndieCade Jury Prix in 2018. It was covered by the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, BoingBoing, and BuzzFeed News.
In January 2018, Jim Mintz, Josh DeBonis, and I talked through how we made it at a New School panel, “Gaming the Financial System”.
