Loy Loy: The Financial Education Board Game for Everyone

By Mrinalini Tankha, Portland State University on the Consortium of Practicing and Applied Anthropologists

Ethnocharettes, role-playing, simulation games, and other embodied pedagogical strategies are receiving increased attention in the field of anthropology. They are also increasingly being used to teach the basic principles of money and finance. These experiential teaching tools provide learners an opportunity to “switch sides” and take on the role of people facing financial hardships. This creates empathy and a more nuanced and critical understandings of socio-economic problems.

Loy Loy: The Savings Board Game

Loy Loy (“Money Money” in Khmer) is a financial education board game developed by a team of anthropologists and economists at the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at the University of California, Irvine, the Department of Banking and Finance at Monash University, and the Department of Anthropology at Portland State University. Loy Loy is a role-playing game where players take on the roles of Cambodian women workers in a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA), earning monthly wages while making monthly contributions to their local savings group. Each month a different player gets a turn to take the pot of savings collected by the ROSCA. As players go through the game, they are hit with unforeseen expenses, but also collect windfalls and have a chance to invest in assets. Intended as an antidote to monopoly, the end goal of the game is for players to collectively save enough money to purchase a garment factory together. The game forces players to cooperate and support one another; everyone loses if any one player goes bankrupt!

Expense and Asset Cards

Loy Loy provides a window into the complexity of financial decision making for people living on the edge of poverty. It educates players about alternative and collective forms of finance where community relationships act as safety nets and provide more immediate ways of confronting economic hardship. In a creative and fun environment, the game demonstrates the ways money and financial instruments are socially and culturally embedded in value systems, mutual obligations and negotiations of morality, while also teaching basic savings and money managing skills and financial literacy concepts such as risk management, income smoothing through credit, value return on investment, and liquidity.


Loy Loy is intended for a broad audience, from high school and university students to financial literacy advocates, educators, and policymakers in non-profits, banks, businesses, and government engaged in financial education programs. Loy Loy is therefore not only an innovative active learning tool for anthropology students but also an example of anthropology in action that breaks out of the ivory tower to educate a wider public engaged in poverty alleviation and financial inclusion.

Pilot testing Loy Loy at my Cultures of Money & Finance course at Portland State University

Loy Loy is currently in the pilot-testing phase of product development. It has already been tested at several universities, international development conferences, credit unions, community organizations, NGOs and foundations. It was also recently on view at the British Museum as part of an exhibition titled Playing with Money: Currency and Games.

Members of The Cambodian Family Community Center in Orange County playtesting Loy Loy

Please buy the game and join us in playtesting Loy Loy! We would also love to receive your feedback. This contributes to the iterative design process and will enhance the experience and playability of the game.

To purchase the game: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/loy-loy-the-savings-game

 Loy Loy website: http://loyloy.org

For more information, contact: Mrinalini Tankha mtankha@pdx.edu or imtfi@uci.edu.

Read more about Loy Loy at the Geek Anthropologist, Analog Game Studies, LA Times, Medium, and IMTFI.

View original post here: https://www.copaainfo.org/post/loy-loy-the-financial-education-board-game-for-everyone

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JOIN US! Next Friday, November 22nd

12-4pm at the AAAs in Vancouver

For those attending the American Anthropological Association (AAA) conference 
Loy Loy has an installation on

11/22/2019 from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM 
CC EAST | Exhibition Hall A  | East Convention Level

Come by the table, check out Loy Loy, and 

get stamped with IMTFI's very own 3-D Harriet Tubman stamp from Dano Wall!

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“Capitalism is so much easier!”— Learning savings through playing a board game

By Farah Qureshi and IMTFI/Loy Loy Team at UC Irvine in the Geek Anthropologist

Loy Loy: The Savings Game in Washington D.C.!

Staging of Loy Loy at the AnthropologyCon Salon in Washington DC

Julia had been waiting until the last round to take her pot of money from the others. She was trying to get 50 Loys from every player to buy the coffee cart for extra income. After passing the star square it was savings group meeting day. She bid 50 and each player was obliged to give her the money, but the request was met with resistance. Earlier in the game, Chris had threatened to leave the savings group when Julia did not lend him money to buy a pig. Her high bid was a gamble completely depending on the players’ solidarity, so she held her breath while Chris’ deliberated his options. While playing, they had all learned that trust was crucial to the game, but she also knew he would not survive long alone. In the end, Chris resentfully handed over his 50 Loys to Julia, it was her first asset purchase anyway, and helping her would overall help everyone. 

Welcome to Loy Loy: The Savings Game (loyloy.org) where you play a Cambodian female worker trying to save up money with the other players to purchase a garment factory together.

In November 2017, our team from UC Irvine’s Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) carried a role-playing board game to the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) annual conference in Washington D.C.. Loy Loy (which means “Money Money” in Khmer) is a financial education tool being developed by IMTFI to teach players how one type of rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) works. Similar to Monopoly, you receive ‘payday’ money upon each circulation of the board, which represents one month in time. However, unlike Monopoly, all players both move collectively with a single placeholder representing time and save together to win by purchasing the $5000 garment factory before the maximum number of months is up. Your progress depends on random events and expenses (such as medical expenses), with occasional opportunities to purchase income generating assets (for example, a pig) despite the pressure to maintain your personal funds. If any player reaches bankruptcy, the game is over for everyone. All players are challenged to come together and reach the goal collaboratively to win, which you can do through extending loans to one another or paying one another’s bills.

As anthropologists like Clifford Geertz and Shirley Ardener have famously written, and as generations of ROSCA members and development professionals have experienced, ROSCAs are commonly used in low-income communities across the world but can differ dramatically from country to country. In East Africa, for example, members of the ROSCA (or chama) make sure that money is separated and stored in a box. All participants pay an equal amount each month, as payouts are all equal. Mexican and Mexican-American tandas provide a unifying social space, encompassing a form of community as well as consistent sharing of funds. In Cambodia, factory workers form a kind of bidding ROSCA. In this kind of ROSCA, each individual contributes towards a collective savings pot, for which each member of the group then bids by offering to repay at a rate of interest they’re willing to offer to receive the pooled funds. In Loy Loy, ROSCA day falls once each round to award one player funds from the pot, instigating haggling and bidding wars between players. Once a player has ‘won’ the pot, they cannot enter a bid on the next ROSCA day until each player has had a chance at winning.

The idea for the board game developed during a closed-door workshop for IMTFI fellows, "Getting Beyond the Survey: Ethnography and the Art of Seeing," where participants convened to share their in-progress research and discuss methodology. A creative group exercise materialized issues found in observations of payment practices in different field sites around the world. You can see the inception video here:

Games are recognized as a valuable tool to communicate complex social dynamics. Allowing students to participate, interconnect and play creates an immediate and ongoing feedback mechanism where failure is reframed as iteration so that learning happens by doing. In this case the game teaches you about your own interactions and relations with money even as it offers a window into the everyday economic challenges and financial practices of people like the Cambodian garment workers who inspired it. As a player, you’re responsible for both negotiating and preparing for expenses that turn out to be impossible to cover using the regular wage income that you’ll receive. Most players realize this within a few turns and begin to develop their strategies while playing, either forming as many close social connections as possible or bidding large on ROSCA days to receive loans and trying to hoard.

The game is engrossing: players are absorbed into a virtual reality constructed through their characters and ROSCA community. In both groups, players passionately embodied their characters while forming new friendships. Unique and surprising banter always appears as each player justifies their reasoning for deserving the money. The game encourages very particular creative thought and debating skills! We ran two testing sessions for interested gamers while at the AAAs, one in the lobby of the hotel where the conference was being held, and the second as invited guests at the AnthropologyCon salon for gaming and games at the conference. Sharing Loy Loy at the AAAs was a fun experience. I found it immensely valuable to receive feedback from anthropologists before and after each session, and in what follows, in the full blogpost I offer just a few reflections on what we learned.

For detailed reflections from the AAAs and background of Loy Loy, read the full blogpost in The Geek Anthropologist here: https://thegeekanthropologist.com/2018/01/26/capitalism-is-so-much-easier-learning-savings-through-playing-a-board-game/.

Interested in keeping up to date, learning more or helping us distribute Loy Loy? Please join us on LoyLoy.org. To purchase Loy Loy, follow this link to the Game Crafter site.