Playing the TestSphere game

Yesterday I attended the #STUGHH test meetup in Hamburg and the topic was “Games of Quality”. And of course I had to bring my TestSphere deck (which I was lucky enough to have been presented by the creator at TestBash. Thanks, Beren!) as I was rather curious to finally test the TestSphere game (lame pun intended). We stayed pretty close to the original rules proposed by Beren van Daele:

TestSphere: The Game

Step 1: Find a group of 4 to 8 persons
Step 2: Divide the deck by category (20 cards each)
Step 3: Depending on the experience of the group: reveal one or more cards
Step 4: As soon as one person can think of a story that features all revealed cards he or she knocks on the table
Step 5: Tell the story
Step 6: This person takes the revealed cards as full points
Step 7: Other people can also tell their stories to get unrevealed cards for half points.

The person that gets X points first or most points by X time wins.
Easy right? You’ve just gotten a whole group of people thinking deeply about their previous testing experiences and put those experiences to verse.

So let’s have a look at the steps:

Step 1: There were two groups playing, the first one consisted of four (which I was in and thus this little post is about) and the second of two. The first one enjoyed the game a lot more, the group of two was a bit unsure of the rules in general (not enough proper communication I guess) and especially if the stories were supposed to be experiences (which is what we went with in the other group) or made up stories. Additionally they thought that two were too few. So suggesting 4-8 seems pretty right to me.

Step 2: Well, we didn’t really do that, but rather had one big pile, which worked as well.

Step 3: All of us were experienced testers (with different background, though), but no one played the game before. So we decided to go with two cards, although both cards had to be of a different color. This worked out quite well. We came up with a story in each round and most of the time people were able to go from there in terms of sharing experiences (see step 7).

Step 4: Knock on wood, this went well.

Step 5: This was actually the main part of the game. We did a small retrospective on the meetup and everyone agreed that the game itself pretty quickly faded into the background compared to the stories and the shared experiences. In this aspect the game very much differed from most other games that were presented at the meetup.

Step 6: Okay, I don’t know where I have that idea from, but I was sure that this rule contained a part about the other players having to agree about the told story being logical. And only then would the story teller be allowed to take the cards. Well, all stories were logical and everybody got their cards, so I guess the blame is on me about adding that twist, which is probably waste. What we also changed was that the story teller was the one to pull the next two cards, so he could influence the next story a bit via choosing certain colors.

Step 7: see step 3. No, seriously. We did all the talking, which was great, but we didn’t award any points, which worked for us.

All in all, I was really enjoying myself playing the game, which ended up being more of a guided story-telling session, but which was really nice. The players from the group of four all agreed on that, the two other ones had some mixed feeling and switched games before their time slot was up, but as I said above, I would blame that on two being too few and not properly communicating the game idea/rules.

Another set of rules I thought about when driving to the meetup, but which we didn’t play was a bingo version of the game, with rules like this:

One person pulls a card and reads one of the three examples given and says if it's 1,2 or 3.

Every person that has a story to tell that is related to the example, tells it!

Every story teller, may note down the example number and the color.

Another card belonging to another color is pulled and it starts over again.

The first to have 1,2 and 3 of the same color, or the same number of every color, wins.

So in case the original set of rules gets a bit boring, this might be a nice little twist.

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