Some interesting security and creativity games plus a few more

Security Games

  • Building the Hydrone - Siemens

Unlike many of the other games in this list, this is not a card game but is a proper board game and covers not just security but the whole Software Development Lifecycle. Really well made as well although a little expensive.

  • Elevation of Privilege - Shostack

This game is a great way to introduce teams to Threat Modeling because it gives the players prompts on what to look for, players may never have threat modeled before and don’t know what the threats are that they might be looking for

  • Cornucopia - OWASP

This is very similar to Elevation of Privelege in style of game, just a few more categories and different threats

  • LINDDUNGO - LINDDUN

LINDDUNGO is another threat modeling game but looking at the privacy aspect of your application and play is quite different to that of both Elevation of Privilege and Cornucopia

  • Backdoors and Breaches - Blackhills Information Security

I have seen Backdoors and Breaches played although I haven’t played it myself yet and it seemed like a great way to role play an incident, so that when, not if, you’re ever caught up in one, you’ve at least had a little preparation

  • d0x3d! - Matt Leacock
  • Data Breach - Martin Kyle
  • Data Heist - Mark Barnabas Lee

Still got to play these three, they all look very interesting though, so I’ll update this page when I’ve tried them out

Creativity Games

  • IDEO Method Cards - IDEO
  • Thinkpak - Michael Michalko
  • 75 Tools for Creative Thinking - Booreiland
  • Kickstart Creativity - Bonnie Smith Whitehouse

All of the above detail different techniques you could use in workshops to get a group of people thinking differently and solicit new ideas. Thinkpak is slightly different in that the whole deck is for one method called SCAMPER

  • The White Box - Jeremy Holcomb

This is a creative kit for creating your own games and contains a book of essays guiding you on how to define game play. It also contains dice, counters, player pieces, counters and some additional pieces.

  • Creative Content Kit - Ana Bender

This is a set of cards detailing different activities to create your content strategy and you choose the activities to perform based upon your budget, the resources and the timeline.

Personal Development Games

  • Career Therapy - The School of Life

A bunch of interesting questions to help you get clarity on firstly if you should change, second what you are looking for and finally on how to approach it. Some interesting points, people with more experience may have already eencountered some of them though

  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The is like one of those calendars that has the quote of the day but if you work through it, taking one card a day it gives you a task/habit you should pickup until it all becomes natural.

  • Core Values Cards - Inspect and Adapt

This is a series of cards that you can use to understand what the values are that mean the most to you, you go through the deck, putting the cards that mean the most to you in one pile and the ones the ones that you’re not that bothered about in the other. You then go back through the keep pile and reject some more and keep doing this process until you get the number of cards that are important down to maybe 4 or 5 and now you have your values which you could use to define your why.

  • Persuasion Pack - Inspect and Adapt

If like me you’ve always found it hard to convince people of an idea or a strategy not because it wasn’t good but because they couldn’t get it or understand the value in it, then you probably just don’t understand human nature. These cards have lots of suggestions on how to understand other people and influence them, there are cards that are low, medium and high risk e.g. if used too often they might backfire or you might get considered a machievalian person. Sometimes being good at what we do, being nice and being honest just isn’t enough.

Agile Cards

  • Retrospective Cards - The Agile Box

A series of different cards to run retrospectives to shake things up a bit and get to the bottom of different types of problems.

  • Virtual Agile Rituals - Agile Stationery

This is a mix between planning poker, t-shirt sizing and the virtual meeting / video conferencing cards I talk about later.

  • Estimation Poker - Agile Stationery

There are your standard planning poker cards for estimating your user stories in story points.

Other

  • Multi-Team Software Delivery Assessment - Conflux Digital

These are a set of cards in 10 categories that contain a series of questions and the team should answer with a score of 1 - 5, it can be astounding how different people in the same team have an entirely different ideas of how well they are performing a particular task. It is also very good at discovering where there are holes in your process.

  • Video Conference Cards - Agile Stationery

These are great for when you can’t get a word in edgeways because people in the room or people who think they’re the most important won’t let others speak. Or when someones audio isn’t working or…