Say It, Don’t Say It

1. Put your name in and start the room. Your screen is the one to put on the projector, or to turn round on the table: it shows the spinner, the score and the clock, and it will never show a word. You are the facilitator — you do not describe and you do not guess.
2. Share the link or the code. Everyone opens it on their own phone and types a display name. Up to twenty people, and there is nothing to install. A phone each matters more here than in any other game on this site, because the describer’s phone is the only place the word is.
3. Wait in the lobby until the players are in — four at least, two a side, for a real game; the room will split two if you only want to try it out. Set the number of rounds and the turn length while you wait: five rounds of thirty seconds is the default and is about right for an opener. Sixty-second turns suit a team that is new to the vocabulary; thirty suits one that knows it and needs the pressure.
4. Pick a pack. Agile vocabulary is the point of the exercise and it is hard — a team that has never played will pass a lot, which is a finding but not a fun one. Plain words is everyday words for what each value is for, and it is the one to start a new team on. Both are on the What it is page, and the pack is fixed once the game starts because the piles are laid out from it.
5. Press Split into teams. The room is shuffled into Team A and Team B, dealt alternately, so an odd number gives A one extra. The seat list regroups so people can see who they are with, and it is worth the thirty seconds it takes for them to move chairs. There is no reshuffle; press Start the game when they have.
6. Spin. Every screen watches the spinner land on one of the four values, and the next describer on the team whose turn it is sees “You’re up” with a Start button. Tell them to put the phone where only they can see it. If they have stepped out, Skip moves to the next person on their team; they are not penalised, and they are next in line when they are back.
7. Let the describer press Start. The clock runs on every screen; the words run on theirs. Your job for thirty seconds is the rule of the table: the describer may not say any word on the card, and if they do, the other team will tell you before you have noticed. Call it, and the describer presses Pass. The software does not know about this rule and never will.
8. End the turn when the clock is at zero. If the answer was in the air as it hit zero — somebody was shouting it — press End turn and award the last word instead, which scores it. That is a ruling, and it is yours. The turn’s words then appear on every screen, got and passed, and this is the moment the room talks: “it was velocity?” is the whole point, so give it a beat before you spin again.
9. Keep the score honest. If a point was pressed by mistake, or the other team argues one out, the +1 and −1 beside each score fix it, and the scoresheet logs the adjustment. There is no undo, and that is deliberate — a correction that says what it corrected is worth more than one that pretends nothing happened.
10. After the last round the game finishes on its own, and the score goes up on every screen with the words by round. Anybody can download the scoresheet. Give people a moment to do that before you close the room, because closing sends everybody home. Finish ends it early if you are out of time — a turn in progress is recorded as it stands.

The debrief

Ten minutes, and the passed words are where it is

The got words are the fun. The passed words are the finding: each one is a term somebody on the team could not explain in thirty seconds, in front of colleagues who could not guess it from the explanation. Put the scoresheet on the screen and ask three things.

1. Which passed word surprised you? Not the obscure ones — the ones the team uses every week. A team that passed on Definition of Done or sprint goal has just learnt something about its own vocabulary.
2. Which value was hardest to describe, and why? The four piles are not equally easy. Working software is full of concrete things; Responding to change is full of plans and the arguments against them. A team that finds one pile much harder than the others usually has a reason.
3. Pick one word that belongs on the “over” side. Gantt chart, statement of work, requirements. Ask what the value says about it — not that it is bad, but what it is weighed against. That is the Manifesto’s actual claim, and most teams have never said it out loud.

A seat that goes away has not left. Phones lock, and the seat and the team both stay exactly where they were — so the room marks the seat rather than removing it. A describer whose phone locks mid-turn leaves the clock running; end the turn and move on. Somebody who unlocks their phone comes straight back to their team.

There is no way to play alone, on purpose. A describing game with nobody to describe to is not a game, and there is nothing in the deck that needs hiding — read it on the What it is page if you want to know what is coming.

The mechanics are Articulate!’s — the describing, the clock, the pass, the spinner, the teams. That game was created by Andrew Bryceson and is published by Drumond Park, now part of TOMY. Its name is a trademark, which is why this game does not use it, and its cards are its own, which is why none of them are here. This is an unofficial variation on the format and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.

Both packs are this site’s own. One is a list of ordinary industry terms and the other a list of everyday words, each grouped by the value it is in tension with, written for this page; nothing in either is copied from Articulate! or any other deck, and neither needs attribution to anyone. There is no licence on them yet. If you want to print one and play with a kitchen timer, do — both are on the What it is page.

The four values, and the phrasing “X over Y”, are the Agile Manifesto’s, published in 2001 by its seventeen authors and freely reproducible with attribution, which this is.