Card Game
Group facilitation methods: Team and Community Building
Identification
This is a simple team building game that is based on the card game Poker.
A team builidng session - because poker is a very competitive game, participants may enter into the spirit of the game.
Howto
Hand out decks of cards to teams. Each team shuffles the pack of 52cards (no jokers) and takes 25 cards - one at a time - off the top of the stack, placing each card face-up on one "square" in a five by five grid.
Once placed a card may not be moved. After all have been placed, each row or column of five is scored like a poker hand (see below) and all those are totaled to provide the score for that round.
Hint:
The usual plan is to try for flushes in the columns and full houses or fours in the rows.
In the beginning of teambuilding you might see a lot of conflict around decision-making, requiring an hour or more, depending on what additional work you chose to do with conflict resolution. If several teams involved, this can also lead to discussion of competition. You can have teams do it several times, timing it as they work more and more as a team.
