Welcome to FLOW
Why does work feel
like quicksand?
Your team starts ten things. Finishes two. Everyone's busy — nothing ships.
Sound familiar?
FLOW is a multiplayer team game that makes the invisible visible.
It shows you exactly why capacity matters, why WIP limits exist, and why
"stop starting, start finishing" is the most important thing
you'll ever hear in agile.
"The fastest way to deliver more
is to work on less."
The Playing Field
Work flows left to right.
You pull it there.
The Kanban board is your game board. Every ticket starts in Backlog
and must travel through each column before it's Done.
Work is never pushed — it's pulled.
Backlog
Auth Module
Load Tests
SSO
⬅ work flows this direction ⬅
Roles & Capacity
You are your role.
Your dice are your energy.
Each player takes a role. Every ticket needs specific roles to complete it —
you can only spend capacity on tickets that need your role.
💻 Developer
🧪 QA Engineer
🔐 Security
🚀 DevOps/Deploy
4
3
= 7 capacity points
to spend this round
Roll high → more capacity. Roll low → tough round. That's real life.
Each Round
Roll. Pull. Finish.
Repeat.
Each round has two phases:
🎲 Roll Phase — everyone rolls their dice to set their capacity.
⬅ Pull Phase — spend capacity to advance tickets toward Done.
Hover a ticket on the board to see your available actions.
Your capacity (7 pts)Full
After two pulls (−5 pts)2 left
After one more pull (−2 pts)Empty
💡 A ticket only completes when all roles have contributed their required capacity.
The Core Lesson
WIP limits are not
the enemy.
Each active column has a WIP limit of 3. Exceed it and you take a
−5 point violation. Painful in the game — intentionally.
In real life, exceeding WIP means context-switching, dropped balls, missed deadlines.
🔒 Blockers can appear — costs 3 capacity to clear. 🚨 Urgent tickets jump the queue and always cause a WIP violation.
The Win Condition
Deliver more.
Violate less.
Finish the most tickets efficiently and your team wins. Your final score:
After the game: talk about what happened. Did everyone start too much? Did blockers cascade?
That conversation is the real lesson.