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:
- A square, just like on the sidewalk, just a position to advance to…
- It could represent a unit of time, like a day, or a sprint
- 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.
What else can I do to give the player ways to deal with impediments? How about some Accelerator cards?
- TDD
- Pair programming
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Deployment
- Automated testing
- 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!
[…] the Impediments Game. You can see some of my efforts: interation 1, iteration 2, Interlude, and Iteration 3. Now I have no experience or expertise designing games, so as you might imagine, there has been a […]