ManGO! Games quarantine activities: online gets hot and wild

Business games should be a regular practice during corporate training or on-the-job recreation sessions. It gains particular importance when employees have been forced to spend months in a new, unaccustomed quarantine environment. This case is about the ManGO! Games team finding a way out and delivering an online business game with life-like intensity and excitement.

Mission: Devise and run a business game to practice risk analysis, decision-making, and team-building skills, along with emotionally rebooting and reuniting the team.

Background:

We needed to come up with a comprehensive solution to be used as a pre-training problematization, a post-training facilitation, or as a separate team-building activity.

The agreed-on game concept focuses on passing through the desert. The final goal is to find and extract gold and come back in spite of all the obstacles along the way.

As the game progresses, the participating teams make decisions on equipment and supplies to be purchased and the route to be followed. They are to make their way through deserts, oases, and villages, all in unsteady weather conditions.

It took us a series of technical and organizational challenges before our game won the hearts of our clients' entire division.

The game gathered more than 60 people into five teams, with the participants being mostly representatives of the FMCG sales department. All in all, the session brought together ten time zones, several countries, while attracting and bringing together people who had never communicated or known each other before.

The game ended with vigorous mutual congratulations and words of gratitude to the organizers. Among other things, we also managed to achieve the level of engagement unprecedented for the online format.

We particularly appreciated the players getting more acquainted with each other's personalities and attitudes towards risk management and decision-making.

The ability of the game to bring participants together and reveal their unknown sides makes it an excellent solution to support a training program or precede a strategy session.