Tag: workshops

Idea vs Sabotage Battle: a game for workshops

A little post to share a simple game I designed for an ideation workshop this week. It went down really well! With my Isle of Wight Biosphere volunteer comms officer hat on, I went to speak to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation about the biosphere and wanted to get their ideas for applying their circular economy thinking to the island as well as ways to avoid failure. I tried the following, and was very pleased to find it generated lots of great ideas and discussion in only about 20-25 minutes.

Split into two teams (in this case the Caulkheads and the Grockles, for local relevance). Each team has a set time (e.g. ten minutes) to produce two piles of post-its, as many as possible. One is full of ideas to make improvements, the other is ways to sabotage making improvements. Best if these are based on past experience and real world examples (without getting into the weeds of debating their feasibility).

Then the battle: each team takes turns in presenting a positive improvement from their post-its for which they get a point. However, the other team can also get a point if they can find a way to sabotage it, but it must be from their pre-prepared post-its and can only be used once.

Create a time limit for idea sharing and at the end of it add up the points to crown a winning team.

I wasn’t very strict about times and allowed a little discussion during the battle as people inevitably volunteered specifics, suggestions or ways to counter the sabotage etc. I also eavesdropped during the first generation phase so I could hear what was behind the ideas, and gave time reminders and prompts to make sure they were writing as much down for both ideas and sabotage strategies as possible. If I was doing it again and I had more time I would try a second round once people are more familiar with the mechanic.

In this case the Grockles won but the Caulkheads had perhaps a moral victory because they decided they didn’t want to sabotage ideas that were lovely, whereas the Grockles had no problem with it. So it just confirmed that you should never trust a grockle šŸ˜‰ (I joke).

This feels like a game with opportunities to expand or tweak, let me know if you have suggestions or if you try it!

Thanks to Danny Birchall for talking through the game mechanic with me!

Game mechanic cards: a workshop inspiration tool for generating game ideas

Game type cards from previous workshops
Game type cards from previous workshops

I’m writing this to share a simple tool I created for a gaming workshop I recently ran for a museum, and also to see if anyone has suggestions for additions or improvements to it. It was inspired by another card-based tool that Danny Birchall and I created for games workshops a while back, found here. That one was designed to help people rapidly generate game ideas around a particular (museum related) subject. It was a stack of cards with a game type printed on one side and the description (generally from Wikipedia) printed on the other. I’ve used them a lot in classes and workshops since, they work well. You’re very welcome to download and use them yourself.

For the recent workshop, I was tasked with helping a room of non game designers understand the possibilities of games, and a bit more about the process behindĀ their creation. We talked about game design, played a load of mobile games (mostly from this list of local multiplayer games) and discussedĀ the mechanics, and then split into teams toĀ generate game ideas, pick a favourite, create a paper prototype, play the other team’s games and feedback onĀ it. We had about an hour and a quarter for the idea and prototyping session.

My overall aim was to focus the participants on thinking about game mechanics (rather than story etc), the effect they have on the player, and how they can be married to the intended learning or behavioural objectives. Given the limited time, IĀ needed a way to give each team inspiration and an easy reference point for possible existing game mechanics rather than expecting them to pull them out of thin air with no experience.

Game mechanics cards selection
Game mechanics cards selection

So I created a set of game mechanics cards with the mechanic, a description, and a couple of hopefully easily recognisable examples. I gave each team a set and encouraged them to use the cardsĀ to inspire ideas. ItĀ seemed to work pretty well, with a bit of facilitation. I’ve linked to them here on Google Drive, I hope this works, let me know if you are trying to access them and it doesn’t work. The idea is you cut each one out onto its own card (a job for which I wish I’d had a guillotine).

Please download/make suggestions for improvements

Please feel free to take these and use them any way you like. If you repost them, it would be nice if you could link back here. It would also be nice if they could be expanded and improved. I’m sure there are lots of mechanics I’ve missed or better examples I could have used. Any suggestions for more mechanics to add? Please add comments below or send to me via twitter if easier. Thanks!

At some point I will go back in and tart them up a bit, they aren’t as pretty as the other cards, at which point I will add in suggestions and will also share them here.