So, you’ve learned how we can help your team grow and develop a culture of cooperation and success, but you’d like to learn a little bit about some of the primary tools we use to do that? Then it sounds like you’re ready to Meet Our Games!
Project What Now?
Let’s clear this up right at the start: yes, the name is a lot! Although, if we’re going to be fair, this game needs a title as wild and complex as Project Ninja Panda Taco (by Jennifer Steen) to even attempt to contain the multitudes that emerge from any given session of this excitement generator. And when employed in one of TourGuide Games’ collaborative storytelling sessions, Project Ninja Panda Taco lives up to the standards set by that title.
Where some of our games focus on clear narrative threads, this one offers something else, something a little bit more abstract in its storytelling. A session of Project Ninja Panda Taco will not necessarily be delivered as a linear story. Instead, your team members will be given a safe environment to compete against each other, while practicing their salesmanship and creative problem solving skills. And they’ll do it all as campy archvillains!
A Project of the Overcomplicated Variety
Now, you might be thinking that this sounds a little too wacky to be an effective team building tool, but let’s talk about what one of our shared storytelling sessions looks like with this game and how it can help build your team’s culture. A typical session of Project Ninja Panda Taco, run by one of our skilled TourGuides, has three main components to it:
- Making the villains and minions
- Creating your world domination scheme
- Opposing your rival’s schemes
Each of these stages focuses on a different bit of your team member’s creative skills and each one tends to carry with it a host of opportunities for excitement, laughter, and the kind of shared communal experience that lends itself to the growth of a team’s culture.
The Real Project was the Minions We Made Along the Way
Let’s start by looking at the Schemes, the heart and soul of Project Ninja Panda Taco. At the start of the game, all of the participants will help with generating a list of words, usually nouns, that will be used as the prompts for our super villains to build their schemes around. No one knows exactly what Project Scarf could even be, but one of your team members may be the mastermind to lay it out. The schemes generated are often over the top, usually terribly silly, and always unexpected. What sort of scheme would you come up with for Project Sofa Snuggy? The sky’s the limit for the world domination schemes, though the projects often stretch beyond the mere sky.
Of course, any good scheme needs some opposition and in Project Ninja Panda Taco, all of your super villains are competing against each other for control of the world. When one player is laying out their plan, another is going to be given the chance to lay out a plan to foil it. And once the plans are laid out, both masterminds must convince, coerce, and most often bribe a host of minions to their respective sides.
This brings us to the very first stage of the game: making your villains. Each of your team members will come up with both a villain and a minion for the game. The villain dreams up wild and wacky projects and usually have the kind of outlandish names found in the sillier pages of old comics. The minions are the ones being bribed, and what a minion loves more than anything else is tools for their tool belt.
When all these components are brought together by one of our TourGuides, you can bet that your team will come out of the session laughing at the absurdity that they just made and witnessed, with shared experiences that will provide a solid foundation for a culture of creativity and team work to flourish upon.
Would you like to learn more about Project Ninja Panda Taco, the benefits of our team building experiences, or any of our other offerings? Drop us a line! And if you’re ready to explore one of our collaborative experiences with your team, let us know!
