Games or activities to help teach on Agile and Scrum

Opening / Priming / Improv Games

  • Cards from {THE AND} card collections. Good conversation starters. Purchase from The Skin Deep.
  • Happy Salmon. High-energy, quick, fun, game. Purchase Details.
  • Funky Chicken. A variant on Happy Salmon. More fun! Purchase Details.
  • Laughter Yoga. Google it. Inject some lightness and good feelings into the gathering.
  • Improv toolkit for Educators. A bunch of improv activities. Details.
  • Ah So Gi. High energy, quick, fun game. See the video.
  • Noah’s Ark. Good way of injecting some fun and activity, or be used as a way of breaking up into groups! Give each person the name of an animal on a post-it note, then have them close their eyes and move around the room until all like animals have found each other and are together.
  • Fruit Salad. Action, warmup game. Details, and try removing a chair from the circle each time.

Mindset Games or Games about the Agile Manifesto or Scrum Guide

  • Presto Manifesto. Teams come up with a list of qualities of a successful team, and then compare that with the Agile Manifesto. Details.
  • The Agile Values Puzzle Game. An interactive way of reviewing the Values. Details.

Games Exploring Relationships and How People Work Together

  • Movers and Shapers. An interesting exercise in exploring group dynamics. Details.
  • Go! An Improv game, for illustrating the Agile mindset. Details.

Design Thinking Games

  • Marshmallow Challenge. An exercise in design thinking and teamwork. Details and video (TED Talk).

Games Demonstrating Agile or Scrum Processes

  • Ball Flow Game Instructions and Spreadsheet Download. A variance on the Ball Point Game, with both teaching on Kanban, retrospectives (continual improvement).
  • Easter Egg Challenge. Shows the difference between waterfall and agile. Details.
  • Paper Plane Game. Demonstrates timebox and improvements. Details and more details.
  • Unlike Monopoly. A Scrum simulation game, which runs over 3 hours. Details.
  • Elephant Carpaccio. An exercise in slicing work, breaking it up into small slices. Details and Preso. Developed by Henrik Kniberg and Alistair Cockburn.
  • Kanban Pizza Game. Learn Kanban concepts, such as limiting WIP, visualizing workflow, feedback loops. Details.
  • Forty Seconds of Scrum. Review Scrum terms in a short amount of time in a fun way. Details.
  • User Story Mapping Game. Quick exercise to demonstrate mapping out user stories and prioritizing. Details.
  • The Penny Game. Demonstrates the theory of constraints. Details.
  • Lego 4 Scrum. Details.
  • 1-minute movie. Scrum simulation (over 3 hours). Details.
  • Doggy Planning. Use it to explain story points and estimataion, in 10-30 minutes. Details.
  • White Elephant Sizing. Play with estimating. Details.
  • Multitasking. Alphabet and numbers: How fast can you go at simple tasks? What if you multitask? Round one: in 10 seconds, write the letters, e.g. A B C D. Round two: in 20 seconds, write letters and numbers, e.g. A1 B2 C3 D4. Round three: in 30 seconds, write letters, numbers, and the letters of your name, e.g. A1R B2I C3C D4H. Round four: in 40 seconds, write letters, numbers, the letters of your name, and the letters of the alphabet backward, e.g. A1RZ B2IX C3CY. From Michael de la Maza.

Games / Activities Getting You Thinking about Behaviour

  • Failure Bow. Not an activity but an active representation of a concept. This is all about positioning failure as being accepted, acknowledged, all necessary for providing a creative environment. Details.

Product Management Games / Exercises

  • Atomic Object’s Collection of Design Thinking Exercises for Product. Details.