How to play Agile WoW – The Board Game – Rules and facilitation tips and tricks

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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

  1. Place the board in the middle of the table
  2. 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
  3. Place all Story cards face up in numerical order in the Sprint Backlog column
  4. Place all Task cards face up for each story in the To Do column
  5. Place one Continuous Improvement card face up on each spot on the board
  6. Place all grey Work unit cubes in their area on the board
  7. Place all red/blue/yellow/purple Skill cubes in their area on the board
  8. 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

  1. Move your Team member token to your player board.
  2. 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!

Want to buy your own game, or play it online?

Here you can read about the online version of this Agile board game >

Here you find the board game for sale in our shop >

Download these instructions in PDF

Click here

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