Keith Nallawalla
Social/Party board games and card games are becoming increasingly popular at parties and games nights. Whilst some of these games are intended for mature audiences, they can have elements can also be great for team building and for demonstrating fundamentals of marketing elements in an easy to understand way.
That being said, you will need to use your own discretion if the games listed here are going to be acceptable in your workplace, as staff at a news station in Ohio were reportedly fired for playing “Cards Against Humanity” in 2016. Although that game is not in this list, some games on this list have the potential to be similar in nature.
These games are suited to members of the marketing team, SEO team, paid search teams or with members from multiple departments. They are quick in nature and can easily be played on lunch breaks or at after-work drinks.
Funemployed
Quick Summary: This card game has quick rounds where 1 player is the interviewer and everyone else is an applicant applying for the same role. It requires players to use several attribute cards that they must be able to reference whilst pitching themselves as the ideal applicant.
Example: the job is a chef. You end up with the cards “flaming sword”, “really good abs” and “calendar model”. You might “As a calendar model, I could be the face of the restaurant and used in any advertising materials. I also have really good abs, so I could work shirtless. It could be dinner and a show. I also use a flaming sword, so I can cook meat as I slice it. This would increase efficiencies in the kitchen by reducing cooking time”. The interviewer would then reveal another card that you must then also respond to. After everyone has had their turn, the interviewer chooses their favourite candidate. There are slightly more mechanics to it, but that’s the basic rules.
Skills it teaches: Primarily, this is game teaches how to use “SEO keywords” (attribute cards) appropriately. It demonstrates how you need to structure your content around certain keywords words, that you might not normally want to work around. This is particularly helpful or fun for the SEO Team, content team and PPC team. The competitiveness of trying to outdo each other can also make this a great game for the sales team to enjoy. Especially if they sell SEO or PPC services and need to learn a bit more about what those departments do.
Warning: There are cards in this game that can have a sexual connotation or might be used in an offensive context. If this is going to be a concern, it is worth filtering out any problematic cards before playing.
Codenames
Quick Summary: This is a game with two teams each with a “Spymaster” who directs their teammates around a grid of words giving them 1-word clues that relate to as many of their team cards as possible without letting them guess anything from the competing team.
Example: You might see 2 cards that represent your team that are “apple” and “lobster”. You might say “red for two”, but if there’s a “firetruck” card that belongs to the other team, it would be risky to say this so you might say “food” or “organic” instead.
Skills it teaches: Sometimes in SEO when you are mapping keywords to particular pages, you want to avoid using terms that are mapped to other pages.
Clickbait
Quick Summary: Each round a new judge draws a card with a weird product image and name on it. They then roll the 5 special dice with letters on them. Each other player has a pencil and paper and needs to make a tagline for the product using up to 5 of these letters as the first letter each weird for your tagline/advertisement.
Example: Here are some examples from when my friends recently played this:
Insect Protein Pills and the letters available were HABNR
- Actually Natural. Honest
- A Buggy Helper
- Really Hard Abs Before Noon
- Homogenised Bugs And Nutrients
- Really Awesome Haggard Bugs
$9.99 Flights To The Moon and the letters were MIGBF
- For Moon, Get Inside Bomb
- Might Fall Back Into Ground
- Bye I’m Going Moon, Fam
- Incredible Bargain Going Fast
- Big Good Moon Flights
Human Taxidermy Lessons and the letters were CTHTM
- Come Try Mutilated Human Taxidermy
- Tasty Meaty Human Cushions Today!
- Help Trump Taxidermy My Children
- Teaching Made Horrifying
- Make Taxidermy Classy Homie
Skills it teaches: This is good way to learn to write ad copy, Facebook posts, article titles etc using unusual criteria. This game is particularly good for your social media or content team, but could also be good for your Google Ads and PPC team as well.
Wikipedia The Game
This game is aging quickly as all the data from it is locked to a certain moment in time right before the game was published, but is also the most work-friendly. There are times in the game when you have to guess which particular Wikipedia pages have had more page views. This is good for helping to get a mind for figuring out the kind of search terms are searched more in Google. Perhaps they will release a new version soon.
