Cards Against Agility is based on the game Cards Against Humanity,
where the former was developed at the Play 4 Agile event in Germany in February 2017.

Purpose:
either to develop awareness or poke fun at Agile practices, as the questions and answers can be rather irreverent. As the original game states: “Cards Against Humanity is a party game for horrible people. Unlike most of the party games you’ve played before, Cards Against Humanity is as despicable and awkward as you and your friends.”

Players: 4-8 (maybe more?)

How to Play:

  1. Distribute 10 answer-cards (white) to each player.
  2. In each round, one player (Questioner) draws a card from QUESTIONS (black) pile, and places it on the table face up.
  3. Everyone else answers with their funniest answer (white card).
  4. Questioner decides the winning card.
  5. Winner keeps the question card, others draw a new answer cards from the pile.
  6. Repeat from 2 until a player exhausts all their answer cards (or a timebox is reached). Winner is player who won the most answer cards.
  7. In case of “Pick 2 cards” players draw one more answer card before placing their answers to the question. In case of “Pick 3” playes draw 2 more cards before playing.

Download and print the Cards Against Agility cards, both the questions and answers. Cut them up. Throw into two hats/bowls, start playing.

Co-creators:
Daniel Hommel, Silvana Wasitova, Bruce Scharlau, Nils Bernert, Edward Dahllöf.

21 thoughts on “Cards Against Agility

  1. Hi Loes,

    let us know how it goes…
    yes, we’ve had many moments of hilarity with these cards, both during the creation process, and then playing it, with international audience in multiple countries 🙂

    Silvana

  2. I seriously can not wait to play this game in my newly designed training! just need to find some space to fit it in 😉 already crying from laughing at the options!

  3. We’ve used this game as an ice breaker for retrospectives (and for English practice) and liked it so much that we adapted a version to brazilian Portuguese. It’s available here: https://bddwarriors.wordpress.com/download/

    It’s very good as an ice breaker because it’s fun, easy to explain and you can play a few rounds very quickly. We distributed chocolate instead of keeping score using the question cards.

  4. I just tested this game out with a group of seven agilists. The concept is sound and we can find uses for it including as an icebreaker, retrospectives, or just for fun.

    We recognize that the cards are Euro-centric by design (and that’s cool). We talked about what cards would come out and what should be added in to make it work in the United States. We also talked through a couple of things that could make it easy for the facilitator to customize (filter) the deck so that certain conversations would naturally arise.

    Nice work game inventors!

  5. Silvana, I am not able to see any data on the question or rules tabs. I only see the answers with no option to print. There’s dialogue box at top of spreadsheet that says my access has changed. How do I get access?

  6. Just played this game as an ice breaker at the start of a team retrospective. It was very successful and the team had way more fun with it than expected! We also had some learning as the answers sparked dialogue around a couple of terms and references some of us weren’t familiar with, like The Penny Game. We’ll be playing this again!!

  7. I’m thinking I can expand on this for use in retrospectives and learning anti-patterns.

  8. Just played this game at the start of a Agile get together it was meant to be an ice breaker but we couldn’t stop playing and we used up the entire meeting. It helped with team building but also a light undertone of learning especially around anti patterns. I would love to get a set professionally made

  9. Hi Thad, the cards are accessible by all for printing. If issues, send me your email address and I will add you to the Google docs.

    The Questions are on a separate Tab in the same file

  10. Charles – objectives are 1) to have fun 2) to learn, or expand one’s knowledge – as often people explain their selected answer. Ultimately, the agilists players take themselves just a wee bit less seriously :).

    Peter, tell us your intentions, and how they were achieved, thanks!

  11. I just used the exercise and it was awesome!
    Did exactly what I wanted to achieve.

  12. I just used this exercise and it was awesome.
    The game did exactly what I wanted.

  13. What is the learning objective here or is this an ice breaker?

    Maybe add a part after an answer card is thrown to define (in serious terms) the answer (and difficulties with it, misunderstandings, how it helped, or more).

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