Guides

Introduction

Guides is the starting point for anyone who has just installed Scam With Your Friends and has no idea what a good shift looks like. The game never walks you through an optimal routine: it drops you at a desk with a headset, a browser and a quota, then lets the office descend into chaos around you. The guides collected here break that first shift into decisions you can actually plan for, from choosing a solo run or an eight-player lobby, to understanding why the boss's review lands when it does. Because the callers are generated live instead of read from a script, no guide can hand you a winning line. What a guide can do is explain the loop, the controls and the failure states, so the only thing you have to improvise is the conversation itself.

First Shift Roadmap

Shift Checklist

Core Mechanics

A run in Scam With Your Friends is a working day, and every working day is judged against a daily quota. You start at a desk, answer incoming calls, and try to move the counter from the wrong side. Callers are driven by a live language model rather than a dialogue tree, so the conversation responds to what you actually say: rambling produces a different result than a short, specific story, and pressure applied too early tends to end the call. Between calls the loop opens up. You can log into the victim's computer, dig for the details the active scheme needs, and come back to the desk before the next caller connects. Because progression is run-based, the day ends with a performance review, and a run that fails that review is over rather than quietly reset. The office itself is part of the loop too: props move between floors, coworkers crowd desks, and hazards interrupt the shift when the floor is at its busiest.

Advantages

The biggest advantage a prepared crew has is that nothing about the day is scripted, so a routine that is learned once keeps paying off. Typed dialogue means a broken microphone is never a run-ender, and the same feature doubles as a way to be precise when a caller is close to hanging up. Splitting the work across a full lobby is enormously efficient: one player can hold the phone conversation while another works the victim computer, and a third keeps the office tidy so the next call is not interrupted by a missing prop. Because the quota is a running total, banking an early surplus buys the rest of the shift breathing room, which is the simplest way to survive a raid or a virus that lands late in the day. Everything the game asks of a new player is therefore learnable in one or two shifts, and the guides here are ordered so the cheapest lessons come first, before the review is looming.

Challenges

The friction new crews hit is real, and most of it comes from the game refusing to explain itself. Nothing tells you which calls are worth the extra minutes or when a caller has stopped listening, so the first shift is usually spent discovering that raising your voice is the worst available tactic. Voice input adds a second layer of setup: speech recognition has to hear you clearly, and startup crashes on older Windows builds have been a documented problem. The office chaos is charming until it costs you a quota, because missing props and coworkers standing in the wrong place slow down the very loop that pays the bills. Run-based progression plus permadeath then raises the stakes of every mistake: a bad review does not cost you a few points, it costs the shift. Learning the systems after the run already failed is the most common and most expensive way to learn this game.

Frequently Asked Questions

Quick Tips