While they were gone, the rest of the team has been busy breaking stories down into tasks that they can estimate discretely. The artifact of The Planning Game is a stack of index cards containing customer stories, which will drive the project's iterations. The critical factor that lets this style of planning work is letting the customer make business decisions and letting the development team make technical ones. Without that, the whole process falls apart. The customer decides project scope, release dates, what stories make up a release, and story priority.
Planning happens often.
This provides frequent opportunity for either the customer or the developers to adjust the plan as they learn new things. Everyone has arrived. Someone begins to talk about what they worked on yesterday, what they would like to work on today, and maybe about something at home. Each person takes a turn. W ithin about 15 minutes, the entire team is synchronized.