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 5 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 learns you about flow and bottlenecks in the flow. At each stage of the flow, a player can pass on a number of chocotoff (determined by rolling a die). Quite quickly if becomes clear how bottlenecks are formed and how 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 are prioritisation, decomposing features (epics) into user stories and refining 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 chose wisely what which items you deliver (taking into account the given effort and business value estimates). Read more about the game here.

Team drawing is game with the objective to draw a particular “artefact’ in group. One set can be played with maximum 10 people. Each person has a string to pull to guide the marker. Obviously 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! More info about next events, go to Agile Belgium on Meetup.com