Mini Scrum Games for Daily Standups
By: Bianca Felecan
Tags: Puzzle, Agile, Team Building, Daily Standup, Scrum

Two months ago, I accepted the very exciting challenge of becoming part of the Scrum Masters Team here at Wolfpack Digital and so I started a new learning journey. Being a Scrum Master means you are responsible for ensuring the team respects the Agile values and principles and facilitating the Scrum events.

Besides focusing on gaining more social and organisational skills, I started to think of new ways I can keep my new team engaged during this weird, online-only Covid-19 situation and also hype them up for our upcoming Online Christmas Party 🎄.

What can I do? 🧐

— I asked myself

When working with Agile and Scrum methodologies, daily standups are a must to identify what everyone works on and if they have any blocker in less than 20 minutes.

But in order to make the standup engaging and maintain the newly formed team excitement, I decided to search for puzzle games’ ideas, and here’s what I found👇

Daily Standup Mini Games

These are the four puzzles I picked:

1. Word searching

Did you find the words? Let me spoil the answers for you:

GINGERBREAD 🍪, CANDLE 🕯, TREE 🎄

We played this kind of puzzle on the first three days and the team loved it! And this is the tool I used to customise the puzzle.

How we played it:

I shared the puzzle via Google Meet

The rule was to write a found word as soon as possible, in the chat, not say it out loud. This way, it was easier to assign the points and to avoid two people shouting at the same time. Only the first person to find the word, got the points

Each word had a certain amount of points, based on difficulty

2. Logic Puzzles

I found a Valentine’s Day logic puzzle here and made some adjustments to make it Christmas-related.

https://www.freepik.com/vectors/christmas — Christmas vector created by freepik

There were 4 best friends in High School. They each had a crush on a different girl and wanted to impress them with Christmas cards.

Find the pairs using the clues!

Paul did not send a card to Maria Alex sent a card to either Christina or Lily Christina did not receive a card from John or Tom Neither John nor Tom sent a card to Diana Tom would never send a card to Maria

Solution:

MJ — Maria got a card from John

CA — Christina got a card from Alex

LT — Lily got a card from Tom

DP — Diana got a card from Paul

3. Letter filling

The team had to fill the missing letters using the available ones:

And they got ‘PUT YOUR CHRISTMAS LIGHTS ON’ ✨.

Same as for the first word puzzle, I assigned different points for each word, based on difficulty. I made this using Google Docs and I shared it with them so they could make a copy to easily fill in the words.

4. Lateral Thinking Puzzles

Definitely the most difficult one, as there’s no 100% correct answer. So I decided to assign 2 points for the correct solution, 1 point for a close one and 1 point if it’s really fun!

Here you can find a list of amazing ones.

As with the rest, I made the puzzles a bit more Christmasy:

There are six presents in the box. Six elves each take one of the presents. How can it be that one present is left in the box?

Solution: The last person took the box with the last present still inside.

The Result

We had a lot of fun playing these and I feel like the team was really hyped to get the most points. And of course, I prepared a small gift, filled with chocolate, for the winner!

personal archive: a screenshot from an anime-themed standup

I really hope you’ll try this and now’s the perfect time as the Holidays are close and your team will love some extra fun. Plus, you get your brain pumped early in the morning.

Happy Holidays!