dowhile team

ColonQuest is a personal finance simulator for Costa Rica. You live three months on the real 2026 minimum wage, in a small town you walk around, while people try to sell you things: an installment plan with insurance nobody mentions, a credit card where paying the minimum keeps the debt growing, a “gota a gota” street lender, and a friend with a pyramid “investment”. The problem is real here. A third of monthly income goes to paying debts, more than half for people who earn under $1,000 a month, and eight in ten people never had any financial education. Most of us sign our first card, installment plan or loan without ever having practiced, and the bill comes later. ColonQuest lets you practice before it costs anything. An AI simulation director writes each month’s events for your situation, and you negotiate by voice or text with characters who never lie about a number but stay quiet about what you don’t ask. A deterministic C# engine keeps every colón, using the real payroll deductions and the legal usury cap, so no amount ever comes from a model. The skill it trains is the one that protects you: asking for the total cost, the rate and the insurance before you sign. A Class Mode lets a teacher see, per concept, which traps the group fell into. Judges run it on their own computer with their own Meta key: download the zip, double-click start_colonquest.bat, paste the key, and choose Guided simulation.