Reading Time: 2 minutes
Main Takeaways
Reading Time: 2 minutes The LEGO Scrum City game illustrates Agile Mindset, the Scrum ceremonies and its roles. The game fits best to close a Scrum training. However, you can run it as stand-alone workshop as well.

LEGO Scrum City

Goal of the Game

The idea of LEGO Scrum City is to teach resp. train the Agile Mindset and the Scrum ceremonies and its roles. The game fits best to close a Scrum training. However, you can run it as stand-alone workshop as well. The game was created by Alexey Krivitsky.

To run the game you split the participants into teams between 4 and 8 people. All teams have the same objective:

We build a city as fast as possible and best within specifications and budget together.

The game is very sophisticated and deserves some preparation time (approx. 3-5 hours). In particular, the game focuses on the Scrum roles and ceremonies as follows:

  • The Product Owner facilitates the game.
  • Each team elects a Scrum Master for its own.
  • The city is built incrementally (sprints).
  • Product owner and Scrum Master agree about overall "Release Planning".
  • Product owner delivers the requirements of the city (characteristics of buildings, streets,  parks, ets.) as user stories.
  • Each team performs for each iteration a Sprint Planning.
  • Sprint Review after each iteration/sprint: each team resp. its Scrum Master demonstrate the Product Owner their deliveries ("Sprint Demo"). And the team reflect on their overall performance ("Team Retrospective")

 

Game Objectives

Product Owner:

  • Learn to organize a Backlog properly, prioritising what is more important first.
  • Learn to measure the team velocity and based on that make decisions, and re-prioritize the Product Backlog.
  • Learn to negotiate with the team about acceptance criteria and the deliverable.

Team:

  • Experience self-organisation and pressure given by the time-box.
  • Learn to communicate focused on the sprint goal.
  • Learn how to plan and organize tasks during a sprint.
  • Learn to estimate fast and precisely based on the experience.
  • Learn to measure performance and improvements.
  • Learn to deal with unexpected events.

Scrum Master:

  • Learn to moderate the meetings.
  • Learn to mediate between the team and the Product Owner.
  • Learn how to deal with Impediments.
  • Learn how to coach and suggest improvements to the team.

 

Time to play: 3 – 6 hours.

 

Downloads

Gaming instructions:   LEGO Scrum City Game Manual (Alexey Krivitsky, lego4scrum.com)

Other Distributions:

Different variants and game settings ( - not necessarily affiliated with Alexey's work!)

 

 

"May the power of bricks be with thou" — Trust me, I'm a trained LEGO Serious Play facilitator.
Give me a call!

: Katharina Friesen, @Anirahtak710 via twitter.com, .