When Alex Trebec was trending on Twitter last week, I felt my heart pause. Celebrities trending on twitter in not always good news. When I learned he was returning to the beloved American gameshow Jeopardy! after pancreatic cancer treatment, I was elated. Jeopardy! returned for its 36th season this week with the same format many families and trainers have grown to love.
The Jeopardy! style games may be one of the easiest formats to implement into a training room. Any level trainer or facilitator can easily create game boards or download templates, and participants need little guidance on game play. Creating answers for your board requires a bit of clever work, but once started, the flow comes easily.
Like other training interactions, Jeopardy! serves specific objectives. It is great for review, knowledge checks, or anything where information needs to be quickly recalled. While it is easy to set up, it can be overused in training and does not serve all objectives. Let’s look at a couple of other familiar game interactions that will have your participants excited about your content. Click each heading to access more information about each type of interaction.
Murder Mystery Style Games
I attend a fantastic murder mystery party every summer. At each of these parties, we work to discover who the murder is and determine motive. At the core, these games are games of elimination. Any objective that asks participants to discover information may be well served by a murder mystery style game.
Family Feud Style Games
Family feud is a click or guess to reveal game where participants make a guess based on survey data. Keeping in line with copyright law, you will want to draw inspiration from this and not copy every element. Also, it is okay to do a bit of fudging with the ranking if it proves a point or serves your objective. Family Feud style games are excellent anchor activities to warm up the group on the content that is about to be delivered.
What game has inspired your training interactions? What would you like to see but have no idea how to get started? Let’s talk about it in the comments below!
