Cookie Monster Mayhem¶

One player is the Tracker. Everyone else is a User. Before the game begins, scatter a collection of coloured cards around the room; each card represents a different website. The Users wander around picking up cards, visiting their favourite sites. The Tracker follows them and notes which cards each User collects.

The game rewards the Tracker faster than players expect. Within a few minutes, the Tracker can tell you not just which websites each User visited, but roughly in what order and how often. It turns out that wandering around picking up cards leaves quite a visible trail.

The Users do have defences.

• An Ad Blocker card freezes the Tracker for ten seconds.

• A Private Browser card forces the Tracker to discard all the data they have collected on that User so far.

But using those cards takes attention, and the Tracker keeps going.

The Tracker usually wins more easily than anyone expected, and the Users start to understand why. Being tracked is the default. Protecting yourself from it is the extra step. That is exactly how it works online: websites start collecting the moment you arrive, through cookies but also through browser fingerprinting and interest profiles built from your history. Some browsers block part of this by default; switching off the rest takes tools and settings you have to go looking for.

Try playing one round without any defence cards, then one round where Users can use them freely. The difference in how comfortable it feels to wander the room will tell you a great deal about what browser extensions are actually doing when they run quietly in the background.

The rules¶

A round runs for three minutes, or until the floor is clear.

The Tracker writes down what each User picks up. When the round ends, the Tracker reads the notes out loud and the Users hold up what they actually collected.

• The Tracker scores one for every card correctly named, and three for a brown one.

• The Users score one for every card the Tracker missed or got wrong.

An Ad Blocker card stops the Tracker writing for ten seconds. A Private Browser card makes the Tracker cross out everything recorded against that one User so far. Both are used once.

Everybody takes a turn as Tracker, and the best score in that chair wins. The job looks like the dull one until it is being scored, and the Tracker who shadows one User closely beats the one who tries to watch the whole room.

What you need¶

Coloured cards, enough to scatter across the whole room, readable at arm’s length by somebody moving. One Ad Blocker card and one Private Browser card for each User. A notebook for the Tracker.

Colour is what lets the Tracker keep up. Writing “three greens and a yellow” is faster than writing four site names, and faster than the Users can move.

The site cards¶

Four or five of each colour, scattered separately so that the colours mix on the floor.

The brown cards are the ones worth watching. A trail of greens and reds says somebody was bored. A single brown in the middle of it says considerably more.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-08.