responsibilities and overcome obstacles. It’s great for learning about teamwork, leadership, communication, delegation, and a bunch of other topics.
There are plenty of other games out there that might be suitable for your learning objectives but the downside is that you won’t always be able to find one for every situation.
Adapt a game so that it fits your learning needs
Adapting an existing game is a way to broaden the range of games that might work for you. The board game Codenames is all about giving clues to link two or more words together. The original game uses pretty random words. But you can easily adapt it, especially in the online version, by switching out the default words for words that focus on your topic. The game then becomes a fun way to revise and review a topic: it forces players to think very carefully about the words, what they mean and their connection to each other.
Or you can create even more involved adaptations. Splendor is another award-winning board game, about building up a store of gemstones, which you use to purchase even more valuable ones. Corrado de Sanctis of the Agile Games Factory has adapted this basic idea to focus on Agile concepts – so by implementing smaller Agile practices, you build towards being able to introduce more in-depth ones. The game, The Agile Mind, works in a similar way to Splendor but uses Agile in place of gemstones.
This can be a more advanced and complex process than the earlier options but at the simple end, adapting a game can just be about briefing and debriefing it differently, or replacing words and images with more relevant ones.
Create a bespoke learning game from scratch
The most advanced option is to create a learning game from scratch. That way, you can focus it exactly on your learning objectives. This takes a lot of time and know-how, though. It can be a tricky problem to work out the best combination of game goals, rules and obstacles to get your players practising and exploring the skills you want.
With Sarah Le-Fevre of Ludogogy, I designe