In April, Mike and I had the pleasure of doing another Game Incubator as an Agile Games 2011 Deep Dive session.

We facilitated three 90 minute sessions with a group of enthusiastic participants:

  1. In Session 1, we of course kicked things off with a game 🙂 and then introduced our five step approach and shared some guidelines. The five steps are Problem, Lead objectives, Aspects, Invent, Debrief – PLAID (pronounced PLAYED 🙂 ). We ended the first session by forming teams around the most popular Problems, who then presented their Lead objectives to the rest of the group.
  2. Session 2 was all about Invention. While keeping in mind the principles of Inspiration, KISS, and Courage, teams collaborated and innovated until the beginnings of a game emerged.
  3. The main goal of Session 3 was to provide a safe environment for teams to present and play their games with the other participants and receive feedback.

When the dust settled, we had 4 great games:

Don’t Blow It – Lead Objective: Trust is important, yet hard to earn and easy to lose.
The Big Payoff – Lead Objective: Maximize portfolio value by finishing smaller projects earlier to gain value sooner.
Timebox Box – Lead Objective: The value of timeboxing.
Pizza Portfolio – Lead Objective: Prioritize your portfolio to optimize the business’ ROI.

The next day, each incubator game was entered in the AgileGames Game Tournament. And out of all the excellent games played that day, ‘The Big Payoff’, conceived just the day before, won ‘Most Creative Game’! Congratulations to the creators, Alex Boutin and Erwin Van Der Koog!

Mike and I will be facilitating another Game Incubator at Agile 2011. Hope to see you there!