Gamestorming 2.0

Appendix B. The Gamestorming Cheat Sheet

We first met Brynn Evans in 2009, at a small event where a raucous group was prototyping some of the very first gamestorming exercises. Brynn told us that the event changed her life and propelled her into the world of game-based thinking and design. In fact, she credits gamestorming for helping her get her job at Google, using the exercises to tackle a design challenge in her interview.

Brynn brought gamestorming with her to Google, where she began using the activities with her team, even holding monthly sessions to familiarize her colleagues with different games. The Gamestorming book became her go-to reference, and she soon realized she wanted to organize the games by the type of problem they could help solve.

That’s how Brynn’s cheat sheet came into being. It’s essentially a table of contents for the book, organized by problem type. She laid out the games into categories like “getting started,” “thinking more divergently,” and “making a decision.” Brynn created it primarily for herself, to use when running sprints and design thinking exercises, but she also distributed it internally at Google and made an external copy available online. This cheat sheet has proven to be incredibly useful. It helps people see how to use the games not just as individual recipes but as a menu that makes it easier to choose the right game for any situation.

Brynn says that the techniques she learned from gamestorming helped her, and her team, to be more effective ...