I was sent a copy of Funnybone Toys‘ newest game called Disruptus in order to play it and review. Opinions of the game are 100% my own.

I received the game and immediately thought it would make a good team building activity for my team at work. I suggested the game to my boss and he said create two sessions and let people sign up for them. In my job I am asked to fix all sorts of problems and that often means creative thinking to get to the bottom of the issue. The game Disruptus is all about disruptive thinking which to me is very similar to problem solving in creative ways. I just had to convey how this game would be of value to everyone on my shift.

I ran the two sessions last week and they went pretty well. For the most part people enjoyed playing the game. To me, game play is pretty simple. We played this way. I played as the judge for the whole game and occasionally participated by coming up with answers to the cards that were turned over. Each person participated as an individual and not as a team. I wanted to see how many great ideas would come out of playing the game.

I shuffled the cards and then rolled the die. I would then select either one or two cards depending upon what appeared on the die. I’d flip over the timer and people would write down their ideas. It took some doing for some of the people to think outside the box. Many times people would come up with things that already existed and other times we got some wacky off the wall answers. There was a decent bit of laughter happening around the table.

One of the items that came up that we were asked to transform was a dumpster. We each came up with different ideas on how to use a Dumpster in a different way but after the session one of the guys in my group was looking at Yahoo news and found a person who took the concept of transforming a dumpster to the extreme. We all got a laugh from that one, and a why didn’t I think of that moment.

The game was fun but I think an hour is about the limit to play. After a while people got a little bored and ideas were getting stale. I also think that if we did this again we’d play it as teams and have a longer time limit. One or two minutes isn’t long enough for a team to really collaborate with each other. Although if you give a team too long to converse they will start second guessing themselves instead of coming up with wacky ideas that could turn into something useful. I’m also looking to let another division in the company borrow the game, that division works in advanced technology and as such are the innovators for our company’s future.