Value is one of the key metrics that we often look at when working Agile and Lean. Value is often called “Outcome”, and is defined by what is valuable to the customer and to our business at any given moment. Working Agile enables us to get quick feedback and adopt our plan after learnings. This enables us to always maximize value.
The impact on value is enabled by:
Short feedback loops
Flexibility in planning
To try out different types of strategies for delivery and planning we have decided play the Battleship Game. Find one or more friends to play with, and let’s get started!
This is the rules page for the Dandy People agile board game, Agile WoW the Game, in proper board game format. This page will always be updated with the latest rules.
Introduction
Join an agile team and work and learn together to complete the work you’ve committed to!
Setup the game
Place the board in the middle of the table
Sort the Daily Events in two piles, one for Week I and one for Week II
Shuffle each pile separately
Place one Daily Event upside down on each corresponding spot on the board
Place all Story cards face up in numerical order in the Sprint Backlog column
Place all Task cards face up for each story in the To Do column
Place one Continuous Improvement card face up on each spot on the board
Place all grey Work unit cubes in their area on the board
Place all red/blue/yellow/purple Skill cubes in their area on the board
Hand out all Player boards and the corresponding Team member token to the players. Players can have multiple player boards or share player boards depending on the number of players
Objective
Work together to get all tasks from To do to Done using continuous improvements and knowledge sharing wisely to tackle hurdles in your way. Because just like in reality. Things will happen along the way 🙂
Overview
The game is played over 10 rounds, each round a day of work. Each round starts with a daily event affecting the team. Then all players simultaneously decide whether to work on a task, knowledge sharing, or continuous improvements.
How to play
Each round has 5 steps:
1. Daily event
Flip the next daily event hexagon. Follow the instructions on the back. The effect is only for the current day unless stated otherwise.
Tip! If the event results in someone not being able to work this round, put that player token on the event during that round to not forget.
2. Get to work
For each team member: Decide what to work on and put your team member token there (discussion encouraged!) You have 4 options.
A. Work on a task in the Doing column. Move a Task from To Do to Doing if needed.
You must work from left to right on the task.
You must have the skill of the next available box on the task.
B. Learn from an expert by putting your token under an expert working (the player with the color of the skill is the expert). In this case, only one day’s work will be achieved, not two. This is due to learning.
C. Review a task in the Review column. You don’t need any specific skill to review a Task and it always take one day for one team member to review a task.
D. Work on continuous improvements by putting your team member token on a continuous improvement. When the Continuous improvement is completed its effect is active from the next turn. You are now a more efficient team. Congratulations!
3. Resolve the day’s work
For each Team member, do one of the following:
Did you work to complete a box on a task? Put a grey cube in the box
Did you work together with someone? Put a skill cube of the skill you learned on your player board
Did you review a task? Move it to Done
Did you work on a continuous improvement? Put a grey cube in the next white box on it. If you have filled the last box the continuous improvement rules are active from the next turn on
4. Go home for some well-earned rest
Move your Team member token to your player board.
Move all finished Tasks in To do (ie it has work unit cubes in all boxes) to Review
5. Start the next day
Repeat until you have played 10 rounds. Good luck!
How did we do?
Take 5 minutes to do this retrospective exercise together in your gaming team.
What went well during the sprint? How can you do more of that?
What did not go so well during the sprint? How can you improve on that?
What did you learn?
Still have questions?
Let us know in the comments below and we’ll update the instructions!
Not many people like being lectured. Not all people like being coached either. But everybody (yes, everybody!) likes games in one form or another. That’s why we’ve created an experienced-based free online game that teaches the basics of an agile way of working.
You can play it yourself or with up to four people, taking the part of a team member in an agile team working on a number of stories in a sprint.
The game introduces:
The look and purpose of a scrum board
How T-shaping improves your chances of succeeding
Why continuous improvements is a good thing in the long run
It’s free and we’ve made an instruction video on how you set it up (because it’s frankly a bit trickier than it should be)
2. Get someone to play with
After creating a “room” you can send an invite code to other players who can join in (they need to create an account as well). Want a video on how to do that? Here you go!
3. Know the rules
Want to know the rules? Then, we’ve got you covered! The rules are available in the game but we made this how-to video just in case:
You can also take the role of a facilitator and play the game to train new agile teams about the basics or let it be the start of a discussion in a more mature team.
After finishing playing, run a retrospective. Follow up the usual “What could have we have done better?” and “What did we do well?” with “How does this compare with real life?” and “Do you work together like this in your teams?” and let the discussions flow.
Playing with people on the same team gets you comparisons to real life (and quite often “why don’t we work more together?”). People from different teams quickly get into comparing ways of working and exchanging ideas. All great stuff, and if you don’t have time to finish the game know that you’ve already won!
In order to create an experienced-based game, we have taken the liberty to simplify some things and we might not follow all the rules of Scrum. But if you are looking for the Scrum Guide you find the 2020 version here.
Target Group:Executives, Managers, Employees, Associates in all functions across the organization, everyone who belongs to a team, and you who also support teams, in an Agile organization.
