Social Media Maze¶

Lay out a network of account cards on the table, each one connected to a few others by lines or strings. Players move their information token across the network by jumping between connected accounts. Each jump reveals a new piece of personal data: a location, an interest, a friend connection, a piece of activity.

• Privacy Settings cards can block a jump;

• Anonymous Mode cards hide which account the token is coming from.

The goal is to reach certain milestones without triggering too many reveals.

The game’s most instructive moments are rarely the big reveals. They are the small, incremental ones: the moment when you realise your token has made it three or four connections away from where you started and you cannot quite trace how it got there. Something you shared is now visible to someone you never intended it to reach, through a chain of connections that seemed reasonable at each individual step.

That feeling, losing track of something you thought you controlled, is what the game is designed to produce. Information on social media does not travel in single jumps. It propagates through networks of connections, and each person in the chain is making their own decisions about what to share further. Privacy settings help, but they act on the first jump. What happens after that is harder to predict.

It often sparks a useful conversation about what “private” actually means in a networked world.

The rules¶

Four of the ten accounts are drawn at the start as milestones, face-up so everyone can see them. A token starts on any account.

A turn is one jump along a piece of string to a connected account. Every jump puts a reveal marker on the account landed on, because arriving somewhere is what discloses it.

• Four reveals on the table is fine.

• The sixth reveal is an exposure. The run ends and scores nothing at all.

• Stopping early banks what has been reached so far, one point per milestone.

• Reaching all four milestones and getting back to the starting account doubles it.

A Privacy Settings card takes one reveal marker back off the table. An Anonymous Mode card makes one jump without placing a marker. Two of each, and they do not come back.

Stopping at five reveals scores better on average than stopping at four, and far better than pressing on to six. The milestones are laid out so that where to stop is never obvious.

What you need¶

Ten account cards, a token, and string or wool to join them. String rather than drawn lines, because the layout gets rebuilt between rounds and drawn lines cannot be moved. Two Privacy Settings cards and two Anonymous Mode cards.

The network¶

The old forum is joined to only two others and gives away the most, because the username reaches back to everything it was ever used on.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-08.