Developing the Impediments Game – Part 4

So today was a day to make a few changes and take stock of where things are at. The first change I wanted to make was to double the length of the game from 20 spaces to 40:

Changing the board like this actually raised a few interesting questions about the game for me. First, what does each space on the board represent? It could be:

1. A square, just like on the sidewalk, just a position to advance to…
2. It could represent a unit of time, like a day, or a sprint
3. It could represent a position in a queue or a backlog

In this case, for right now I’m going to just keep it simple. I haven’t assigned any particular meaning to the spaces (although the astute observer might notice that they are now arranged in rows of ten, just like some sprints…). All I really want to do right now is insure that the game is sufficiently long enough that I can guarantee that whatever strategies each player of the game uses has a chance to fully play itself out in the duration of the game. In the first iteration of the game, with only 20 spaces, the game could play itself out in 4 rolls of the dice. That seemed too short, so I’ve switched to 40 spaces.

The other thing I felt it was important to do was to spend some time just playing the game and question the value that I was getting out of it. So I played this longer version, but just with the impediments, not with the risks. I learned that if I played two players with equal strategies – in other words both doing the best they could to win given the circumstances of each roll of the dice, the game felt a little frustrating. You spent your time trying to move toward the finish and were constantly being assaulted with impediments. It felt pretty tedious.

That brings up an important point: in most board games there are both positive and negative things that can happen to a player, even if they all just occur by chance. The classic “CandyLand” is like that. Playing with just impediments is kind of depressing. Especially when you can’t do anything other than pay their price. That’s where adding an element like risks to the game allows you to start doing something to proactively avoid impediments. Integrating risks into the game makes it feel much more interesting. Apparently dealing with impediments doesn’t feel nearly so bad when you have a strategy to deal with them. I think there might be some keen observations on learned helplessness lurking under that observation someplace.

What else can I do to give the player ways to deal with impediments? How about some Accelerator cards?

What would accelerators be? Here are some examples:

1. TDD
2. Pair programming
3. Continuous Integration
4. Continuous Deployment
5. Automated testing
6. Retrospectives

Each one of these things are the types of activity that a team can use to mitigate the impact, or even completely avoid some kinds of impediments. Time for more cards! I’m going to have to hit the office supply store soon!

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