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AGILE RESOURCES

Agile Games

Instructions, techniques, and approaches for interactive games that provide fuel for invention and learning!

These Agile Games were originally published on Tasty Cupcakes, a community-run website founded by Michael McCullough and Don McGreal after they presented a series of games at Agile2008 in Toronto. The site’s tagline was “fuel for invention and learning.” After 15 years at TastyCupcakes.org, the content has found a new permanent home here at Agile Alliance. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

If you’re an Agile Alliance member, you can submit and Agile Game for inclusion in this directory.

Three Headed Expert

This classic improv game illustrates the frustration and fun the interviewee/s gets from answering questions one word at a time.

Thirty-Five

This game demonstrates that prioritizing by comparing two items at a time is easier, quicker, democratic, and inclusive, and it requires stakeholders to compromise on their preferred features.

Destroy

This game provides a fun and creative way to learn about teammates, serving as an excellent team-building exercise, particularly for geographically distributed teams.

Intuitions

This game demonstrates that people may be surprised by their intuitive abilities, making it a great warm-up activity that encourages observation and fosters informed intuitive decisions, while also providing a fun and engaging experience for the group.

Video Reframing

This game highlights the importance of reflection and the power of abstraction and re-framing by applying insights from seemingly unrelated videos to the team's situation.

Upside Downside

This game balances optimism and risk management by having one group focus on "yes, and…" viewpoints and another on "yes, but…" viewpoints, making it a fun way for teams to evaluate options.

Story Spines

This game mirrors the creation and development of user stories, encourages creative problem-solving, promotes collaborative solutions, and emphasizes accepting change within a specific goal context.

The Sprint Mural

This game encourages silent, visual reflection on the Sprint, fostering individual contributions, inviting interpretations and explanations, and creating a visual storybook of the project's journey.

The Sprint Limerick

This game encourages teams to create a limerick to encapsulate the Sprint or team values, promoting creativity and cohesion while following the specific AABBA rhyme scheme.

Once Upon A Time In Legoland

This exercise was co-created as part of a collaboration day between Geoff Watts and Paul Goddard. Timing 60 minutes Materials A lot of Lego pieces (Optional) A Digital Camera and […]

Movements of a Hypnotic Nature

This game underscores the value of early customer feedback, strategic design and execution, cross-functional team innovation, iterative and incremental development, and managing subjective requirements in Agile projects.

Swedish Stories

This game highlights collaborative story-building, the "yes, and" concept, the importance of "offers" in teamwork, and how user stories can evolve creatively and unexpectedly through collaboration.

Top Traits

This game helps the development team gain a deeper understanding and empathy for their users.

First Letter, Last Letter

This game prioritizes active engagement, listening skills, and team attention over the quality of the story, making meetings more enjoyable.

Free Market Prioritization

This game demonstrates that collaboration can occur unexpectedly, stakeholders need to pool resources and support each other's priorities, and no single stakeholder can dominate due to the equitable distribution of bidding power.

Musical Bells

This game highlights several learning points: adults often struggle due to the absence of sheet music and a designated leader, underscoring the importance of a clear vision, early and continuous testing, and collaboration.

Celebrity Prioritisation

This game illustrates the importance of making timely decisions, focusing on key priorities, and establishing clear criteria, highlighting that indecision and excessive debate on minor details can lead to failure in Agile projects.

The Project Manager’s Nightmare

The Project Manager’s Nightmare is a game intended to demonstrate the benefits of limiting Work in Progress (WiP). It also shows the madness of the situation that many Project Managers […]

Die Card Die – The Interruption Game

Die Card Die – An Interruption Game is a card and dice game for teaching the impact of interruptions on iterations. This game was created as part of the “Agile […]

Lean Startup Snowflakes

Timing 60 minutes (can be extended to 90 minutes by running more iterations). Setup/explanation takes 10 minutes; we’ll run 4-5 iterations of [3 minutes of execution, 3-4 minutes debrief, and […]
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Additional Agile Games content is being added – please bookmark this page for future reference.

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