Do Financial Literacy Games Actually Work?

Search for a financial literacy game and you’ll find hundreds of options built on the same appealing claim: learning personal finance through games beats reading about it, because you practice decisions instead of memorizing definitions. It’s a claim worth checking. Over the past few years, researchers have tested game-based financial learning with randomized trials, large field studies, and meta-analyses - and the answer they’ve converged on is more interesting, and more useful, than a simple yes or no.

We make a financial literacy game ourselves, so let’s be upfront: none of the studies below tested Ricco, and nothing here should be read as scientific proof that our game - or any specific game - will improve your finances. What the research can tell you is when game-based learning tends to work, when it doesn’t, and what to look for.

The short answer

Research suggests financial literacy games can meaningfully improve financial knowledge and engagement. The evidence for lasting real-world behavior change is more mixed, and games are not automatically better than traditional instruction - in a large four-country randomized trial, game-based teaching produced gains comparable in size to those found in previous traditional financial-education studies. What separates games that work from games that don’t is instructional design: real decisions, visible consequences, and structured reflection.

Everything below unpacks that answer, study by study.

Research snapshot: six studies worth knowing

Financial literacy games research has matured quickly. These are the studies we’d point a skeptical friend to - each recent, peer-reviewed or from a public institution, and linked to the original source.

Two caveats before drawing conclusions from this table. First, most of the rigorous studies tested students, not adults - we come back to what that means below. Second, these studies evaluated other games and programs, not Ricco. They tell us about the approach, not about any one product.

What financial literacy games seem good at

The clearest benefits of financial literacy games show up in three areas.

Building financial knowledge. This is the strongest and most consistent finding. In the four-country randomized controlled trial by Cannistrà and colleagues, a game-based program improved students’ financial literacy scores by 0.313 standard deviations - a meaningful effect for an educational intervention. Kalmi and Rahko found the same pattern across 640 students in 42 Finnish schools: robust, well-identified gains in financial knowledge from game-based instruction.

Making people care about the material. Personal finance is a topic most people avoid until forced to deal with it, so engagement is half the battle. Platz and Zauner found that strategic game mechanics paired with direct reflection prompts increased what education researchers call utility value - learners’ sense that the material is personally useful. When a topic stops feeling abstract, people stick with it longer.

Delivering education that works in general. Games are one channel for financial education, and the channel’s foundation is solid. A meta-analysis of 76 randomized experiments covering more than 160,000 people, published in the Journal of Financial Economics by Kaiser, Lusardi, Menkhoff, and Urban, found that financial education produces positive effects on both financial knowledge and downstream financial behaviors. That study covers financial education broadly rather than games specifically, but it answers the prior question - whether teaching people about money helps at all. It does.

Where the evidence gets weaker

So, are financial literacy games effective? For knowledge, the answer looks like yes. Beyond that, an honest reading of the research requires some qualifiers.

Knowledge gains don’t reliably become behavior change. The Finnish study is the clearest illustration: the same experiment that found robust knowledge improvements found generally weak effects on financial behavior. Knowing how compound interest works and actually starting to save are different outcomes, and games that move the first don’t automatically move the second.

The most impressive behavior numbers come from the weakest designs. The FDIC’s 2025 evaluation of its How Money Smart Are You? games reported that budget use among users rose from 57% to 69%, regular saving from 52% to 62%, and emergency savings from 66% to 71%. Those are encouraging numbers - but the evaluation was quasi-experimental, and people who choose to play a financial education game are plausibly already motivated to improve their finances. The FDIC’s design cannot establish that the games caused those changes, and the report is careful about this. So should we be.

Games are not automatically better than traditional teaching. The Cannistrà trial - 2,220 students across four countries - found that game-based instruction produced results similar in size to what earlier studies measured for traditional financial education. The medium alone is not the advantage. A tedious game teaches no better than a tedious lecture.

Knowing facts isn’t the same as deciding well. A 2026 study in Acta Psychologica by Chamberland and colleagues found that participants’ financial knowledge was only weakly positively related to how well they performed in a financial simulation. The authors point instead to higher-order decision-making skills - planning, adapting, managing trade-offs under uncertainty. That cuts both ways: it humbles quiz scores as a measure of financial capability, and it suggests that practicing decisions is a different (and neglected) kind of training than studying facts.

What makes a financial literacy game more likely to work

Read across the studies and a pattern emerges: the games that teach are not the ones with the best graphics or the most points and badges. They are the ones that force a specific cycle to happen, over and over.

Each piece of that loop has research behind it. The reflection step is the one Platz and Zauner isolated: game mechanics alone weren’t what increased perceived usefulness - it was mechanics combined with direct prompts to stop and think about what just happened. And the loop as a whole is where Chamberland’s higher-order decision skills get exercised: you can’t practice adapting a strategy in a worksheet, but you can in a game that lets you fail cheaply and try again.

This is also why simulations are a distinct category within game-based financial learning. A financial simulation game that runs an entire financial life - income arriving, bills coming due, savings compounding, surprises hitting at bad times - naturally forces every step of the loop, because each month’s decision becomes next month’s starting condition. A trivia-style quiz game, by contrast, exercises recall but rarely consequence.

If you’re evaluating a game for yourself, a class, or a workplace program, the checklist is short: Does it make you choose under constraints? Do choices have consequences you can see? Does it prompt you to reflect? Can you replay with a different strategy? A game that misses most of those is entertainment with financial vocabulary.

What the evidence means for adults

Most of the rigorous games research was conducted on secondary and university students, so applying it to adults takes some care. Two pieces of evidence suggest the findings travel. The Kaiser meta-analysis spans populations of all ages, including adults in a range of countries and income levels, and finds financial education effective across them. And the FDIC evaluation - for all its causal limitations - studied actual adult consumers using self-paced online games, the closest setting to how an adult would encounter a financial literacy game today.

A reasonable reading for adults: the mechanisms games rely on - practice, immediate feedback, low-stakes failure - are not age-specific, but nobody should expect a game alone to transform their finances. The practical move is to treat a game as the rehearsal layer in a broader routine: play to test strategies and build fluency, then convert what you learn into one concrete real-world action - setting up an automatic transfer, canceling a subscription, comparing a loan’s total cost. If you want more structured ways to practice, we’ve collected twelve financial literacy activities for adults that work solo or in groups.

Where Ricco fits

Transparency first: the studies above did not test Ricco, and we won’t pretend they did. Claims that any specific product is “scientifically proven” to improve financial literacy should make you suspicious - including ours, if we ever made them.

What we can say is that Ricco is a financial literacy game built deliberately around the loop the research keeps pointing to. You manage a simulated financial life month by month: a salary arrives, bills come due, and you decide what to save, invest, or spend. Consequences show up in your next month’s numbers, monthly summaries give you the material to reflect on, and every new run is a chance to try a different strategy at zero real-world cost. Whether that translates into better real-world decisions for you is exactly the kind of claim the evidence says to be careful with - which is why the honest pitch is practice, not proof.

The bottom line

Do financial literacy games work? The fairest summary of the research: yes for knowledge and engagement, when the game is well designed; genuinely mixed for lasting behavior change; and no, not automatically better than a good teacher or course. The medium matters less than the loop inside it - decisions with real trade-offs, consequences you can see, reflection, and another try.

If you’d like to feel what that loop is like with a full financial life attached, you can play Ricco free in your browser and practice your money decisions in a simulated environment - where the mistakes are free and the lessons aren’t.

Sources

1. Cannistrà et al. (2024). Journal of Comparative Economics. doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2024.08.001
2. Kalmi & Rahko (2022). Journal of Economic Education. doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2022.2038320
3. Kaiser, Lusardi, Menkhoff & Urban (2022). Journal of Financial Economics. doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2021.09.022
4. FDIC (2025). “An Evaluation of How Money Smart Are You?” Consumer Analytic Insights. fdic.gov/consumer-research/evaluation-how-money-smart-are-you
5. Platz & Zauner (2025). Education Sciences. doi.org/10.3390/educsci15020227
6. Chamberland et al. (2026). Acta Psychologica. doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2026.106906

Ricco is a financial education game. This article summarizes third-party research for educational purposes; it is not financial advice, and the cited studies did not evaluate Ricco.