Category: Games for any meeting

Today we are very excited to announce the release of the new Gamestorming Card Deck app for iPhone.

The Gamestorming Card Deck is drawn from the GoGamestorm.com blog, the companion website to ‘Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers’ by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and Dave Macanufo. The cards are frequently updated and will help you learn the fundamentals of visual language, how to illuminate complexities by mapping the big picture and how to use improvisation and games to innovate and solve real problems and help you feel more confident about using visualization in meetings.

The cards in this deck show you not only how to play — with images and instructions on both sides of the cards — but how to organize the games into favorites and ‘agendas’ for your meeting in the form of stacks. The stacks can be played by swiping through each of the cards as you proceed through your meeting or brainstorming session.

Here’s how it works:

After you’ve downloaded the app, click on the app icon to open the app.

You’ll see a deck of cards that you can scroll through, just like you can scroll through apps. Each card represents a game from the Games Wiki. (The app syncs with the wiki, so whenever we add new games to the wiki you can add them to your app by going to the settings menu and clicking “refresh.”). Tap a card to open that card.

You’ll see the large version of the card. If you tap the little dog-ear to the lower right the card will flip over and you can read the instructions for that game on the back of the card.

The instructions are exactly what you would see in the book or on the Games Wiki. You can scroll down to read the whole card.

There’s also a stacks menu, where you can create a stack by adding cards.

Once you have a stack, you can click “edit” to rearrange the games in the stack. Create as many stacks as you want. For example you might create one stack for a brainstorming meeting, one for a company retreat, and another for your weekly status meeting. When it’s time for the meeting just open the stack and you can quickly flip through the games in that stack.

Let the games begin!

Get the app now.

Object of Play

A recurring challenge in group work is managing discussions so that every individual has a chance to contribute, and no individuals dominate the meeting. By using simple “talking chips” as a currency for contribution, a group can self-manage the flow of participation.

How to Play

1. Before the meeting starts, each participant draws a chip (poker chip, coin, or similar) from the center of the table.
2. A participant places his chip in the center to speak.  Once all of the chips have been placed in the center, participants may remove their chips from the center to speak in the same manner.  The process repeats.

Strategy

Talking chips make the value of everyone’s contributions tangible and give everyone a chance to speak. They are just as effective at drawing out otherwise quiet participants as they are at containing dominant ones.

Talking chips is based on the idea of currency and was developed by Dave Gray, inspired by Byron Reeves’s innovative email program, Attent.

Object of Play

Feedback is difficult to manage in large group settings. For the presenter and the audience to track with each other, they need a means to communicate their approval, disagreement, or confusion as the event progresses. Red:Green Cards provide a simple means for channeling this feedback.

Number of Players

Works well in any size group, but especially useful in large groups of 20 or more

Duration of Play

A simple Red/Green exchange takes only a moment to play—the length of time it takes to ask a question. If there is disagreement or confusion about a question, time for discussion may be required.

How to Play

Each participant needs two cards: one red and one green. During the event, they may hold up the green card to indicate their approval or the red card to indicate their disapproval.  In their simplest form, the green card means “yes” and the red card means “no.”

Participants may hold up the cards to answer a specific question or they may use them simply to show how they feel about a topic at any time. For example, a presenter may ask the audience directly, “Have we covered this topic sufficiently to move on?” to get a quick understanding check. Likewise, participants may hold up their cards unprompted, nodding heads and holding up green cards in response to a topic—or holding up red cards to register an objection.

Strategy

Using Red/Green Cards helps solve two sticky problems in large groups: it eliminates the need for “we all agree” commentary, while surfacing participants who would otherwise fume over unheard objections. In short, it’s a simple way to open a feedback loop with a large group.

Red:Green Cards was developed by Jerry Michalski. In his design, yellow and gray cards may be incorporated to represent “neutral” and “confusion.”

Object of Play

A common element of brainstorming or group work is the “let’s go around and hear from everyone” routine. The rule governing this is a valuable one—that everyone speaks once before anyone speaks twice.

There are two problems with this, however. First, moving from one person to the next in a round-robin fashion can be an energy drain, even with a small number of people. It’s predictable, and the participants at the end of the line are often short-changed. Second, and potentially more damaging to the activity, is that often a participant’s attention wanes when she is “on deck” and preparing her own thoughts as opposed to listening to others.

The Button is a simple technique that keeps true to the original rule while avoiding the traps of a round robin.

How to Play

When the group is asked to report on a question, a small token—it may be a poker chip or something similar—is given to the first volunteer to respond. After his response, he chooses a person who has yet to speak to take the button. This continues until everyone has spoken once.

• This can be done easily with index cards instead of a button. Participants think about their answers to a question first and write a word on the card along with their name. The cards are passed to the left in a quick manner for a few moments so that in the process of passing the order becomes scrambled. The participants then call on each other by way of reading the words aloud and asking the writers to explain.

Strategy

Randomization keeps the participants’ attention.  When you don’t know if you will be called on next, you will be more present and focused. The Button game also passes control onto the participants, by giving them the power to nominate the next speaker.

The Button is inspired by the Native American “Talking Stick” tradition, where a ceremonial object such as a stick or feather, representing the right to speak, was passed from one person to another to respect speakers and avoid interruptions.

Object of Play

Like Red/Green Cards (discussed later in this chapter), this is a technique for managing the feedback loop between a facilitator and a large group. When working in breakouts or as a large group, it may be necessary to periodically gauge the level of perceived consensus, without spending an unnecessary amount of time talking about it.  A facilitator may ask for this quickly by using the “five-fingers check.”

How to Play

The facilitator asks the group to rate their level of consensus on a topic from 0 to 5, with five fingers meaning “absolute, total agreement” and a fist meaning “completely different points of view.” This is particularly useful in managing breakout groups, where different topics may be discussed simultaneously.  A group that holds up a variety of ones, twos, and threes may have more work to do.

Strategy

The “trick” in this technique is in gauging how far apart the individuals feel they are from consensus. A group that is wide apart in the view of its members—with some holding up five fingers and others holding up two—may need outside support and mediation of their discussion.

Hand signals are a commonly found element of consensus-based decision making and dispute resolution. Related is the thumbs-up, thumbs-down, and thumbs-sideways technique.