Kanban Quest is a role-playing game designed to create an environment for safe-to-fail experiments for knowledge workers. Here you’ll find a set of rules and tools that can be adapted to simulate countless scenarios that programmers, accountants, lawyers, recruiters, and other knowledge workers may encounter in the real world. But unlike the real world, within the scope of Kanban Quest, you can experiment with a wide variety of innovations without consequences.
This guide will introduce you to the game, the tools used in gameplay, the game setup and order of play, and many (but not by any means exhaustive) rules that can be combined to generate realistic simulations of knowledge work. Finally, you’ll find some scenarios to get you started.
The game designers come from a software background, so much of this guide is written with software development in mind, but a clever game master can easily adapt these rules to create realistic scenarios for anyone who is involved in performing tasks in sequence in order to generate value in which factors such as speed, quality, consistency of flow, minimizing wasted effort, reducing rework, improving predictability, and satisfying stakeholders are important considerations.