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Agile Games

Instructions, techniques, and approaches for interactive games that provide fuel for invention and learning!

These Agile Games were originally published on Tasty Cupcakes, a community-run website founded by Michael McCullough and Don McGreal after they presented a series of games at Agile2008 in Toronto. The site’s tagline was “fuel for invention and learning.” After 15 years at TastyCupcakes.org, the content has found a new permanent home here at Agile Alliance. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Everyone is right, only partially

Exploring Perspectives, Improving Relationships The quality of the relationships between people is directly related to how much they trust each other, and trust (as a manifestation of Psychological Safety) is […]

CLUE: The Retro

This is a semi-self-paced retro designed to be done within 60-75 minutes. It uses the board from the board game Clue as a metaphor. This retro was designed for use […]

What you think is what you get (WYTIWYG)

A mindfulness exercise that helps us to take the stance of not-knowing and to recognize how quickly we let ourselves be guided by our first impression. With this bias we often miss the chance to explore alternatives and thus leave even much better solutions uncovered.

Drowning in Dependencies? Try a new Dependency Game!

Find a golden path to delivering maximum business value by benefiting from collaboration vs. getting stuck in dependencies. This new game will help your organization learn the dynamic and importance of dependency management in a fun and impactful way!

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

This game is designed to introduce the basics of Scrum by walking players through Scrum Events using the simple creation of a children’s comic book as the product. Here is […]

Remote Comunication

In these times of remote teams, it is always difficult to generate pleasant team dynamics. I have used this dynamic several times, it helps me to improve communication, cohesion, and […]

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) Principles Card Sort

Introduction This exercise teaches the 10 Principles of Large Scale Scrum: It’s a great exercise as a warm-up activity for Introduction Training to Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) Preparation: Write on […]

The Ultimate Workshop Planning Template

Introduction Good workshop planning is key when facilitating workshops, training, and events. Often details of your workshop planning might be scattered across several mediums but this canvas brings it all […]

Flipping Agile Pizza

An online mashup of Ralf Kruse’s Kanban pizza and the penny flip game. The initial version was distributed to my network and I have seen at least one variation. This […]

The Scrum Workflow

This is a useful exercise to conduct in a classroom or together with your Scrum team. It creates alignment around the purpose of each event in Scrum and the roles […]

Debunking Multitasking with Cards

This card game simulates project management by having teams organize a deck into ordered suits, exploring efficiency through prioritization and limiting multitasking.

Pair Poetry

This is an exercise to help people understand why pair programming works; in particular why it produces better code. It has some usefulness for helping technical team members understand this, […]

The Turkey Game: Agile Product Management

Learning Goals Introduce Product Management skills, story splitting, and iterative product development in a simulation that we can all relate to–preparing a big holiday dinner. Holiday meals require lots of […]

Art Gallery Retrospective

This is a retrospective technique I learned from Esther Derby and Jerry Weinberg. I’ve extended it a bit differently into the analysis and deciding what to do portions as they […]

Newspaper Retro

Background This is an idea I presented at the Retrospective Facilitator’s Gathering in May 2019. Newspaper articles tell stories based on facts. So this retrospective idea is to use this […]

Conway’s Compositions

In 1967, Melvin Conway introduced the idea that states “organizations which design systems… are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” This has […]

Egg & Shell

Experience the power of letting go, how it feels like to trust and to focus on someone who is relying on you.

Valuable Paper Airplanes

Understand Scrum aspects like transparency (Definition of Done) and basic Scrum process of inspection and adaptation. It is based on well known Paper Airplanes game and is modified to go away from the factory of producing as many airplanes as possible towards producing airplanes that are valuable.

The MatchUp Canvas

Great teams act interdependently to achieve product outcomes. That doesn’t happen by accident. It takes deliberate effort. By proactively determining how teams depend on each other, agreements can be made […]

The Spark Engine

This game acts as an icebreaker taking people outside their comfort zone in an easy, safe way. It sparks the creative juices of team members, warming up the creative side of their brains and fostering an environment where it is ok to share ideas even if not perfect.

Sprint Simulation – Scrum Practice Game

A simple, interactive, and collaborative game to experience at a high level the ceremonies and common practices of Scrum through simulating a sprint. This game has been used as one […]

Pass on Perfection

"Pass on Perfection" is a collaborative game that combines "Yes And..." thinking and the Perfection Game concept to streamline ideas into a minimally viable set through structured discussion and consensus, developed to enhance team agreements and product development processes.

Dice Of Debt

This game illustrates the importance of dealing with technical debt. Over the course of 10 sprints, a software development team will try to deliver as much software value as possible. […]

Positive Change Canvas

The main point is that other people look at your positive stuff and propose improvements on top of that. The shifted perspective does miracles. Give it a try!

Time-Tree-Fertilizer Retro

See your past project/release in the time-tree-fertilizer metaphor which is another use of visual metaphors. This approach to Retrospectives is the most effective when you look back at a longer period of time like project or release.

The Lean-STAR Game

A short game demonstrating the negative impact of Work in Progress (WIP) through a team activity involving connecting dots to form stars, showing that reducing WIP increases efficiency and reduces delivery times.

Logo Maze (Why We Test First)

Timing 20-30 minutes Materials 1-pack of sticky notes pens for each group of 3-5 people dry erase board, table, window, or wall to set up the maze Instructions Explain to […]

Agile Jenga Testing Game

A Jenga-based game introduces agile development concepts effectively, fostering hands-on learning and understanding of agile methodologies through structured, interactive challenges.

The Scrum Gauntlet of Debt

The Scrum Gauntlet of Debt is a 30-40 minute interactive exercise highlighting the importance of refactoring in Agile development. Through a physical game, it demonstrates the risks of technical debt, emphasizing sustainable software development practices.

Additional Agile Games content is being added – please bookmark this page for future reference.

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