Our agile games backlog for the evening contained:

1. Two rooms and a boom
2. Chocotoff mini games
3. Amoeba Electric Fence
4. Product owner value game
5. Team drawing
6. TDD Concurrent code

We’ve played the first five games.

Two rooms and a boom is a fun group game in which the bomb (red team) has to kill the president (blue team). The objective of the red team is to kill the president, the purpose of the blue team is to save the president. In each team, a leader is appointed who can exchange people (“hostages” ) between 2 groups. Check out the video below to learn about the game.

Chocotoff mini-games teach you about flow and bottlenecks in the flow. At each flow stage, a player can pass on a number of chocotoff (determined by rolling a die). Quite quickly, it becomes clear how bottlenecks are formed and how to further pushing “items” makes it worse! Limit your work in progress!

Amoeba Electric Fence is a team building game in which the entire team must cross over the top of the “electric fence”. The game builds on trust, and it takes some ‘physical’ effort and thought on how to cross each person. We’ve succeeded without injuries!

Product owner value game is a card game teaching how to refine a product backlog. The activities prioritise, decompose features (epics) into user stories, and refine user stories until ‘ready’ state for delivery. The cards abstract some ‘real world’ detail by predefining the effort and business value. The game focuses on understanding how backlog refinement works: refinement has a cost (don’t refine everything upfront); focus on steadily delivering value and choose wisely which items you deliver (taking into account the given effort and business value estimates). Read more about the game here.

Team drawing is a game to draw a particular “artefact’ in the group. One set can be played with a maximum of 10 people. Each person has a string to pull to guide the marker. Communication (in some form) is required to coordinate the drawing. Constraints can be introduced, such as no verbal communication, blinded sight, external noises, etc. The game shows how a group of people coordinates, and an observer can identify roles in the team (e.g. a leader, etc.).

Thanks to the people who joined! For more info about subsequent events, go to Agile Belgium on Meetup.com.