The Game Where Students Play the Predatory Car Dealer, and Learn to Beat One
Next Gen Personal Finance (NGPF) has won the 2026 MAIA for Best Non-Profit School-Age Financial Education Project for Shady Sam’s Slick Wheels, a free arcade-style game that teaches American high school students to spot predatory car sales tactics by putting them in the dealer’s seat.
Every year, millions of Americans drive off a car lot having been outmanoeuvred by a professional whose entire job is to maximise what they pay. Young people, especially those without family members to coach them through the process, are the most vulnerable. Auto loans are among the largest financial commitments young adults make, and among the most exploited.
Launched in September 2025, Slick Wheels flips the script.
Playing the villain to beat him
In the browser-based simulation, students don’t play the victim. They become Shady Sam, the fast-talking dealer who layers on hidden fees, inflates interest rates, extends loan terms and bundles unnecessary add-ons to extract maximum profit from unsuspecting buyers. The logic is simple: you can’t be fooled by a trick you’ve already run yourself.
That role reversal is the innovation. Most financial literacy tools teach students to be better consumers. By experiencing manipulation from the inside, students internalise tactics far more effectively than passive instruction allows. The approach has earned international recognition beyond the MAIAs: the original game in the franchise, Shady Sam Loan Shark, received a D&AD Wood Pencil, a Silver Serious Play Award and Fast Company World Changing Ideas recognition.
More than a game
Slick Wheels is built as a complete experiential learning loop. After playing, students reflect on how it felt to wield pressure tactics, and how their customers felt on the receiving end. They name and apply a taxonomy of persuasion: time pressure, social pressure, scare tactics, bait-and-switch. They work through real GAP insurance scenarios with actual numbers. And they close with what NGPF calls the most powerful transfer question in education: what advice would you give a friend buying their first car?
The game is completely free, requires no login or download, and works on any school device. It sits inside NGPF’s Buying a Car Mini-Unit, one of the organisation’s most-accessed curriculum areas, paired with a companion worksheet and full teacher resources. All content is free of advertising and student data collection.
Reaching the students who need it most
NGPF serves more than 5 million US high school students annually through a network of 140,000+ teachers, with deep reach into Title I schools serving lower-income communities. That distribution matters: personal finance education has historically been absent in the schools where the financial stakes are highest.
The impact case extends to gender too. Women are disproportionately targeted in auto sales, often quoted higher prices and steered toward longer loan terms. By embedding these tactics visibly into required coursework, the game equips all students to recognise and resist them.
Adoption has been rapid. Slick Wheels logged 96,000 plays in its first six months. Its predecessor, Shady Sam Loan Shark, has generated 1.6 million plays since 2023, and NGPF sees the franchise expanding into other high-stakes consumer traps: predatory credit cards, payday loans and rent-to-own schemes.
“To win a MAIA on a global stage means everything to our team,” says Tim Ranzetta, Co-Founder of Next Gen Personal Finance. “It tells us that making financial education genuinely fun and joyful is powerful. When a game about spotting a bad car deal is engaging enough that a judge can’t stop playing, we know we’re reaching students in a way that lasts.”
Play Shady Sam’s Slick Wheels and explore NGPF’s free curriculum at ngpf.org.