ABOUT

OBJECTIVE
To teach anyone the basics of game design, the power of designing games for learning, and the confidence that they can be awesome game designers in little time-provided they break free from their game histories, and explore new (surprising) combinations of game elements. You can use the card deck in whatever way you wish to make this happen. Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

RULES

THE ALPHABET

Pile Sorting:
Players are given the deck of mechanic cards and tasked with sorting them into categories:

  • Any kind of category counts.
  • Find a category for every mechanic.
  • Make sure no mechanic is on its own.

Matching:
Using any of the decks (mechanics, settings, components, learning objectives, and tricks), try to match the elements with a real game.

Working in groups against other groups and enforcing a time limit can really help you learn this alphabet.

GoG Rule Book

CONCEPT GENERATOR

Players are assigned/choose elements from the different decks, for example:

  • 1 learning objective
  • 1 setting
  • 2 components
  • 3 mechanics
  • 1 learning trick

They are tasked with coming up with a unique game concept that must include (but is not limited to) all those elements. Players fill out the game concept form and their concepts are assessed.

Working in groups on the same conditions and adding a best concept wins adds excitement. Assessing by vote (not on your own) is also fun and insightful.

Concept Form

CONCEPT EVOLUTION

Players need to get used to the experience of receiving feedback on creative concepts and incorporating feedback into new design.

A quirky human trait of ours is to overvalue the things we build overselves. Getting critical feedback on our ideas is tough. Taking it in and really working with it is a skill most of us could work on. Here are two ways to make this easier and fun:

Sabotage: Take away and/or insert new elements into a players’/groups’ initial design.

Co-creation: Rotate designs to other players to build on and make improvements.

Submit Your Play

DECKS
Game of Games - Learning Goals

What do you want players to learn in your game?

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Game of Games - Settings

Where will this game actually be played?

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Game of Games - Components

What items need to be part of your game?

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Game of Games - Mechanics

What rules will your game be built from?

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Game of Games - Learning Tricks

What insights from the Science of Learning will you include?

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PLAYS

How to learn recognition, empathy, and out-reach

Full Story

How to learn tough French words in the car

Full Story

How to build confidence at the student bar

Full Story

How to add drama to learning the traffic rules

Full Story

How to better understand the readings

Full Story

How to test your game concept

Full Story

How to teach Kenyan school kids about biocontrol

Full Story

How to find your research topic

Full Story

How to set goals at the start of University

Full Story

CONTACT
If you have any feedback or questions, please reach out to me at zabamuk@luc.leiden.com. I appreciate your input!
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Struggle in the City

Struggle in the City (SITC)

Struggle in the City is a project where students at Leiden University College (LUC) teach Recognition, Empathy, and Outreach through games/simulations.

Setting
I, Caroline Archambault, run a project (Struggle in the City) where students from LUC spend a semester learning about a struggle in the city of The Hague. To learn more here is the website link. The final product of the course is to contribute a Game/Simulation concept and tested prototype to the project with the aim of teaching Recognition, Empathy, and Out-Reach. The Game of Games was originally developed for these students. I use it to unlock their creativity and give them the confidence that they can produce innovative games.

Players
A class of undergraduate students at LUC, an honors Liberal Arts and Sciences College in the Netherlands. The students come from a diversity of backgrounds and are pursuing interdisciplinary studies.

Rules
I devote a whole lesson to playing the game (1hr30min) so that I can play all 3 versions of the GoG.

The Alphabet game I have them do in teams with a time limit. I give each team a full deck of mechanics. They struggle a lot with finding ways to categorize them and it really makes them pay attention to the mechanics.

Concept Generator I have them play in their teams and I make it competitive. I often throw in their least favourite mechanics from the Alphabet game for an extra challenge. When appropriate I also suggest that we play the winning concept. It is also fun to have them pick out the cards blindly that they have to work with. I usually make the teams work on the same constellation of elements to show how you can come up with very different concepts with the same elements.

Concept Evolution is really important for my students because they don’t like negative feedback on their original ideas. Both sabotage, by having other teams replacing mechanics that they have to incorporate, and co-creation, where they build on other teams ideas, work really well.

Showcase
The Alphabet: My favourite classification that these students regularly come up with is Mechanics I like, Mechanics I don’t like. This gives me the opportunity to explain to them that like Letters in the Alphabet, there is no good reason to not like a letter. It is the combination of letters into a game that you might not enjoy.

Concepts Generated: I have so many I could showcase because they end up making really fun concepts. Here is one example:

With the following elements:
Learning Goal: Making friends
Setting: Library
Components: Pen and Paper
Mechanics: Deduction, Acting, Scenario-Driven

The winning concept had a game master write notes inviting people at the University library to take a break from their studies/reading and join them for a round of silent charades. The note gave a scenario and a hint to the secret location of the game. Once players assembled they played a few rounds of charades based on categories like “My favourite book” or “what I am studying now.” We wanted to actually go and play it but never managed to find time.

French Is Hard

Setting
My daughter just started middle school and has French as a subject for the first time. She finds it really difficult. She needs to study lots of vocabulary and feels that the words just don’t stick.

Players
We were on a day trip with an hour long drive. We were 4 in the car: my two daughters (10 and 12 years old), myself (mom), and my boyfriend (who was driving).

Rules
We played Concept Generator. We had the same Learning Objectives (French vocabulary words), Setting (family car trip), and Components (none). We each had 2 different Mechanics. We had 5 minutes to think of a game that we could actually play in the car. We would then each pitch the game and my daughter who had to learn the French words chose her favourite.

Showcase
Mika’s Game: J’adore les crepes! A role play

The game master is the student that needs to learn the vocabulary. They set-up the game. They identify the vocabulary words they find most difficult and they give each player a set of 7 vocab words with their translation on a sticky note. They assign roles to each of the players. Since we played with 3 players there were 3 roles:

1 – The client of a restaurant
2 – The waitress in the restaurant
3 – The manager/host of the restaurant

The idea was to have a conversation where you used as many of your words that you could. The first person that uses all their words successfully wins.

The game master learns the vocabulary by writing down the words for all the players.
They also learn the words during play, both by trying to use their own words but also by hearing other players use their words.

Confidence At The Bar

Setting
LUC offers Experience Days for prospective students. LUC staff provide sample classes to showcase what and how we teach at the College. I gave a demonstration on Game of Games and how I use it in my course Struggle in the City.

Players
These are 17-19 year-old international prospective college students. I had two rounds of playing with 4 teams of approximately 4 students per team in each round.

Rules
They played The Alphabet and Concept Generator. They were given the following elements:

Learning Objective-build confidence
Setting-student bar
Components-blocks, cups, and a spongy food item (like a Burrito).
Mechanics-trading, memory, scenario-driven

They had 12 minutes to fill out the Concept Form. Each team had to present their game concept in a 2-minute pitch. We then voted for best concept (you couldn’t vote for your own).

Showcase
Team Green Kikkers with the Game: A Block’s Story

1. At the student bar everyone picks 3 Blocks. The blocks represent an Action (embarrassing situation), a Place (a foreign country), and a Persona (spontaneous).
2. Trading round: Everyone gets to trade their blocks but without knowing what they are receiving in return.
3. Socialise and share stories. You have to remember one.
4. Pitch the stories your remember.
5. Person who remembers the most wins a Burrito.

Players build confidence around talking to and sharing ideas with strangers.

Learn The Traffic Rules

Setting
Student support officers from international high schools were visiting Leiden University College to learn about the program. I was invited to share with them our Global Citizenship program and teaching innovation. I gave them a brief demonstration on Game of Games and how I use it in my course Struggle in the City.

Players
These were high school support staff from all over the world: Europe, North and South America, and Asia. They were 16 in total so I split them in 4 groups of 4.

Rules
They played Concept Generator. They were given the following elements:

Learning Objective-learn the traffic rules
Setting-classroom
Components-cards, jelly beans.
Mechanics-acting, route builder, player elimination, and roll/spin to move

They had 10 minutes to fill out the Concept Form. Each team had to present their game concept in a 2-minute pitch. We then voted for best concept (you couldn’t vote for your own).

Showcase
Team Road Rules with the Game: Dramatic Drive

1. Students at a driving school are split into 2 teams competing against each other
2. The team that crosses the finish line first wins.
3. Every advance is made by placing one jelly bean down on the route.
4. Jelly beans are earned by guessing the charade correctly.
5. Someone from your team has to charade the traffic rule on the card.
6. The person charading is determined by a spinning pointer.
7. If the team does not guess the rule correctly in time, the charading player is eliminated.
8. The traffic rules get harder and harder the farther along on the route you are. There are 5 levels of difficulty.

Designers learn the traffic rules by figuring out which rules can be charade and how to organize rules by level of difficulty. What are more complex rules?

How to better understand the readings

Setting
I am Caroline Archambault and I teach an undergraduate course at Leiden University College which aims at introducing students to the field of Environmental Anthropology. To start the course, I assign some key foundation texts that are quite heavy and hard to really grasp. In order to help them take in the material I used a Game of Game session to have them design a game that would teach the main lessons of the readings.

Players
I used 1 class session of 1hr 45 min to introduce and play Game of Games. There were 22 students who were divided in 6 teams. There were 3 readings and so I had 2 teams on a reading.  This way there would be 2 different interpretations of each readings. By the end of the session they pitched their concepts to each other and voted on the best game for each of the readings.

Rules
We played a rapid Alphabet Game just to learn some mechanics and then moved into Concept Generator.

I gave the teams a good amount of time to come up with the Learning Objectives of the game. This is a learning hot spot. They have to talk together about the reading and what the most important lessons are to teach in the game. Those become the objectives of their game.

The two teams that shared a reading also shared a setting for the game. One group had online, another a college dorm, and the third group a public square. But each team worked with different components and mechanics. This resulted in a diversity of game concepts.

Showcase
The teams that had to create a game around the Ethics primer to be played in a college dorm setting, designed games that prompted personal ethical reflections on scenarios. They ended up both transforming this into a drinking game to lure in students to play a game that really matters in a fun, low stakes, and social way.

Students Evaluation

I really enjoyed the session!! It was very interactive, and made me reflect on a reading in a way that I had never experienced before! I also enjoyed the challenge of building a game in 15 minute, which I didn’t think we could achieve!”

I found it refreshing and thought that it helped me reflect on what the fundamentals of the studied text were. This is because you needed a clear conception of what you were trying to communicate to others in order to make an intelligible game.

It was a complete change of perspective on the concept from the article. Instead of learning about something, we retraced the process of coming up with the concept because that’s the only way to effectively confer knowledge to the participants of the game. I really think that I have a very solid understanding of our team’s article now. The presentation by the other groups was also helpful in conceptualising the other articles, but to a lesser extent.

I found it challenging as we walked in class without a prior notice of what we would be asked to do with the reading material, so we had to quickly absorb all the new concepts learned about game design, remind ourselves of the content of the reading, and think creatively with classmates for trying to combine both. I enjoyed the challenge!

It was, but it pushed to think outside the box

I definitely had a lot of fun! I really enjoyed the thinking process with the team. We laughed a lot and I got to know the classmates in my team better, which will be great for the rest of the course.

How to test your game concept

Setting
A team at Leiden University College have set out to design a game that can be used to recruit students to the college. The idea is to play it in highschool classrooms and it will give a window into what it means to study at this Liberal Arts and Science program. An initial concept was conceived by a small group of staff and they wanted to test if they were going in the right direction.

We organized a session of Game of Games to bring in other perspectives from the college into design ideas. We wanted to see what they would come up with and what insights this could bring to the current design.

Players
Participants included students and teachers from different majors and educational staff from different areas of the college, including the Dean of the college. We had 4 teams of 4 (mixing students, teachers, and staff).

Rules
The parameters were set as follows:
The overarching learning objective was to learn about LUC and the kind of education you receive here. But the specific learning objectives were open so that we could see what people felt were the most important elements of our program.
The setting was highschool students and a classroom-based game.
The components were free.
The mechanics were:
Asymmetric starts, drawing, and negotiation

After a brief introduction and taste of the Alphabet game, teams were given 20 minutes to come up with a concept.

Showcase
Fliptopia-Distopia to Utopia

Learning Objective:
Emphasize that LUC prepares you to be an active changemaker
Introduce players to some of the pressing global challenges
Demonstrate that you can engage locally to work on these

The board is made up of tiles representing different challenges. The gloomy/current situation is face up and players want to cooperate to flip the tile onto the bright side. How can they flip? By accomplishing 3 tasks:

1-They need to identify the challenge illustrated in the tile by unlearning misinformation. They need to identify the wrong messages and why they are wrong.
2-Then they need to have “conversations” across divides. They need identify different perspectives and stakeholders on the issue and why some people don’t want to change the status quo.
3-They need to come up with local, personal initiatives that they can contribute to for addressing the challenge and commit to trying this. If the team commits they have achieved enough collective action points to flip the tile!

The game is a long play game. Teams of high school students work the semester to flip their tiles.

How to teach Kenyan school kids about biocontrol

Setting
We are a team of researchers from Leiden University, the Netherlands and Rhodes University, South Africa, who have initiated a project aimed at addressing the growing menace of invasive plant species in the rangelands of Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania. We are exploring the possibility of using biocontrol to control the invasion of prosopis. One of the first steps required is to introduce the technology of biocontrol to Maasai communities in the region. One way to do this is to integrate a biocontrol lesson in the school curriculum. We are exploring doing this through developing a classroom game. We are using Game of Games to explore potential concepts. The first use of Game of Games is among the team to refine our ideas of what needs to be taught.

Players
We did a 1hr 30 min session online with 8 people to explore possible concepts. We had asked team mates to share with us the top 10 learning objectives of an introduction to biocontrol so that we could start the design session with this in hand.

Rules
We played a rapid Alphabet Game just to learn some mechanics and then moved into Concept Generator.

The parameters that we set were:
-The learning objectives
-The setting
-The players

We left people free with the mechanics and components of the game. We then shared our designs with each other and explored what were some central elements and the advantages and disadvantages of different concepts.

Showcase
There was lots of diversity in concepts and a range in complexity of design.
Simpler concepts used the Quartet model of matching and collecting to learn the plants and their agent.
The complex concepts took on the stages of invasion, impacts of invasion, and biocontrol resolutions.
Collective play and action was emphasized.
Differences in who you were (the agent, the pastoralists, the weed).
Next step is to run a session with Maasai.

How to find your research topic

Setting
I am Joeri Reinders and I teach an undergraduate course at Leiden University College called Research Methods for Earth, Energy, and Sustainability. It is aimed at preparing them for their capstone research projects within this major. One component of the course is to explore what factors go into choosing a research question and used Game of Games to have students design a game that would help others find their research question.

Players
I used 1 class session of 1hr 45 min to introduce and play Game of Games. There were 13 students who were divided in 4 teams. By the end of the session they pitched their concepts to each other.

Rules
We played a rapid Alphabet Game just to learn some mechanics and then moved into Concept Generator. I gave the teams a good amount of time to come up with the Learning Objectives of the game. This is where they have to decide what the most important factors are. The teams worked with different constraints: different settings (classroom, bar, college dorm) and different components and mechanics. This resulted in a diversity of game concepts.

Showcase
Name: EES Capstone Jeopardy
Setting: This is a team game played in the classroom.
Goal: Come up with a research proposal (topic and method)
Components: Pen and Paper, Cards

Play:
There are 3 groups of questions separated according to EES tracks
Teams take turns choosing questions (each question is worth a different amount of points depending on difficulty)
Teams can spend their points unlocking methods and trade them.
When someone has found a match between a topic and method they like, they can break off from their team and create a research proposal.
Once a player has created a logical research proposal, they are rewarded with an old capstone closely matching their idea (that they can use for inspiration).

Students Evaluation
“I thought that it was very interactive and encouraged thoughts about where and how to begin thinking about the capstone process.”

“I liked the session, at the beginning I was really confused where it would take us and while I liked our game, the questions a different team came up with where very cool and could actually help coming up with a capstone topic.”

“I learned new ways to think about how to choose a capstone, which can be helpful if i get stuck looking for a topic. For this it’s also useful that each group came up with their own approach.”

“It was challenging because there are some many factors about game building and capstone planning that needed to come together for a coherent result. Combining different thought processes with different people was also challenging as not everyone approaches topics in the same way.”

“Very fun! Nice to CREATE something.”

How to set goals at the start of University

Setting
In April 2024 Jaarbeurs in Utrecht hosted the Impact Fair- “the largest Impact Experience in Europe” (https://www.impactfairnederland.nl/home/impact). This 3-day event brings together “everyone-companies, organizations, young people and all involved Dutch people – who want to make more impact and are looking for inspiration!”

I demonstrated Game of Games at this Fair because it is an innovative method to learn and facilitate change. Alongside providing a demo at the Leiden University College booth, I also gave a Master Class session of 45 minutes. In this session I did a 20 minute design workshop with participants.

Players
There were a range of participants. Some were NGO workers. Others professional game designers. And other teachers.

Rules
I introduced Game of Games and its various applications and then I went into a rapid workshop to give them a taste of the game and design process.

The parameters were set as follows:
The learning objective were:
(1) Identify all of your life goals
(2) Find different strategies to achieve these goals
(3) Experiment with these different strategies
(4) Share what works/what doesn’t with peers 

The setting was the first day/week of a study program. Any amount of time (30 min-30 days)

The components were:
Pen and Paper and String

The mechanics were:
Pick up and deliver and Real time

In pairs they were given 20 minutes to come up with a concept.

Showcase

Lifeline

Learning Objective: Learn how to think about life goals and how to reach them.

Spin a rondel for a life goal each
Set a string as your line
Take turns to draw 3 strategy cards.
Choose one strategy to put on your line and one for the others line with an explanation.
Repeat until all lines are full.
Reflect at the end which strategies you will actually try.

Now play a round with your own goals identified (not chosen from the rondel).

Submit Your Play