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Cards Against Agility: a fun game for agile fans and cynics alike

If you’ve spent a week or more working in tech, you’ve probably experienced several Agile ceremonies by now. From the hour-long daily standup to the carefully choreographed sprint demo, so much business value is unlocked and the best part is that becoming a certified expert only takes two days.

Agile started with the best of intentions, but now we've got consultants taking liberties with stuff like "story point normalisation" and "design sprints". We've got to Make Agile Great Again, and it all starts with a hilarious card game!

Cards Against Agility is a card game based on that format you know & love, but taking aim specifically at the nonsense of 'Capital A' Agile. This game won't make sense outside of the tech industry... but if you’re an Agile fan, you’ll enjoy it, and if you’re a cynic like us, you’ll absolutely love it.

How to play 

As we know, Agile is mostly about knowing which contrived terms to use for basic concepts, and so as you’d expect, Cards Against Agility cargo cults that approach.

• Cards Against Agility consists of Epics (statement cards) and User Stories (answer cards).
• The game is played by Resources (people). No individual names, job titles, or pronouncements of seniority should be assigned to Resources. 
• Resources take it in turns to be Scrum Master, who is in charge of delivering an Epic on time and on budget.
• A game of Cards Against Agility is called a Sprint. Each Sprint is time-boxed to 15 minutes.
• Each Resource plays a User Story to complete the Epic. 
• The Scrum Master picks a winner, and the winning Resource scores 3 points (i.e. the score the Product Owner believes every Epic should be.)
• The Sprint concludes with the Sprint Retrospective, wherein the Scrum Master adds up the total points from the game and announces: "Great game, everyone! Julie won this Sprint the [score] points. You achieved [total] as a team, so let's make a commitment to [total+5] in the next sprint." 

The game itself

Cards Against Agility is printed by a specialist card game printer, on casino-grade 320gsm linen finish triple-ply cards with a plastic coating. That means the cards are extremely durable, and have a nice weight for idle fiddling during a long and boring meeting.

The game contains 60 questions and 140 answers, which usually yields a 15 to 30 minute game for 3 or 4 people, depending on your velocity. You can get away with 2 players, and could probably stretch up to about 10 players before there are too few User Stories to keep all resources at maximum utilisation.