Story Cubes

Subject

Team Start-up / Team identity

Participants

(Agile) teams, stakeholders, the entire organization

Facilitator

Agile Coach / Agile Master

Summary

Each story die shows a unique symbol on each side. The original story dice set consists of nine dice and 54 different symbols that can be used to generate new stories over and over again.

Definition

Creating stories by pictures on a die.

Motivation

Promote creativity in the team and encourage team members to think about their problems in a different way.

Results

You get information about a problem or situation where all team members think ybout together and provide their input.

Benefit

Releases creativity and extends people's moderation skills. It is also a good warm-up activity for retrospectives, team workshops and so on.

Procedure

The Story dice game works very easily. When it is a player's turn, he/she rolls the dice. Then he/she has to try to tell a story that reasonably links all the symbols rolled - that's it. There is no winner or loser, but there are plenty of colorful stories. New combinations of the 54 symbols always result in new stories. You can decide about the amount of the dice for each story. For example, the facilitator can ask each team member to roll the dices once, afterwards choose four dices and make up a story about the last sprint, using the symbols available.
In another variation of the game you can include the complete team. For each story use the number of dice as you have players/team members. The player who roled the dice starts with the story, the next player takes the next die of his choice and creates the next part of the story.

Tools

Set of Story dice / Story cubes

Hints

This game is not only to create content during e.g. a Retro, a very important goal of this game is team building.
To get an appropriate set of story dice / story cubes, any set you can find in a toy store is fine. There are online versions for the story cubes game available for remote teams.

See also

Remote Ice Breaker
How to facilitate an agile Retrospective using "Rory Story Cubes"