This project focuses on the creation of a serious cybersecurity game to spread awareness regarding basic cybersecurity concepts. With the rising frequency of cyber attacks and their increasing lethality to organisations, cybersecurity is now a joint responsibility where every employee in an organisation plays a crucial role and thus needs to be vigilant. Traditional forms of cybersecurity training often fall short on engaging non-technical participants (who often perceive cybersecurity as an extremely difficult and complex concept), thus proving ineffective. The project aims to address this gap through the design, development and evaluation of a two-player card-based game named 'Wards and Firewalls' that teaches the relationships between common cyber defence methodologies and cyber attacks by abstracting these complex technical concepts into simpler mechanics through the involvement of medieval and fantasy themes. This project can potentially reduce the chances of cognitive overload and foster the important concept of adversarial thinking, which many currently existing games fail to introduce at early stages.

The proposed game follows a Systems Development Research Methodology (SDRM) and the Agile method of the SDLC to iteratively develop and evaluate the prototype. The research aims to verify the extent to which this gamified approach of introducing common cybersecurity concepts can improve a beginner's understanding of the same. Furthermore, it aims to verify how effective this two-player and card-based mechanic approach to the game is at fostering adversarial thinking and maintaining player engagement.

The intended contribution of this research is to provide an effective proof-of-concept for the usage of gamification coupled with thematic abstraction of technical concepts in cyber awareness trainings and develop a working prototype that demonstrates an effective pedagogy for cybersecurity awareness, which is crucial in today's digital world.