Agile Games

At Derailleur Consulting we believe that people learn better by doing rather than just listening or observing.  When we deliver our training and talks with customer teams, we like to get them involved with demonstrations and games that help to reinforce the concepts they're being exposed to.  Below are links to some of our favourite interactive agile games.

The Penny Game

The purpose of this game is to demonstrate to participants the productivity advantages of organizing work products into small, lean batches that quickly move through work queues.  In the process, a significant impairment of single-pass/phased waterfall delivery methodologies is exposed. All you need is four participants, some pennies and a stopwatch!

The Scrum Ball Point Game

This game expands on the queuing concepts of The Penny Game while demonstrating the principles of agile team self-organization.  The objective is simple: Pass as many tennis balls as possible between team members within two minutes while observing a few rules such as ensuring the balls have "air time", aren't passed to an immediate neighbour, and your start point is your end point. Play spans several "iterations" with five minute intervals for planning.  This is a game that's best played with a large group.

The Lean Lego Game

This game helps put into practice how an agile project actually works using the ubiquitous toy of almost everyone's youth: Lego.  Francisco Trindade and Danilo Sato developed this simulation for the Agile 2008 and Agile 2009 Conference to expose participants to key concepts like push vs. pull systems, wwaste, systems thinking and how they work when applied to a complex, collaborative project.  You will need to get a couple of kits of basic Lego for this game and set aside a couple of hours for play.