Strategy games to stretch the mind, develop innovative approaches -- and overcome seemingly insurmountable tasks

A HipBone Game is a game of creative leaps between thoughts. The thoughts themselves are the "moves" the players make, and the "links" they claim between them are what make the game challenging and enjoyable -- and the process itself a powerful tool for uncovering tacit knowledge, while building bonds of collegiality, respect and friendship between players.

What's a HipBone move?

A move can be any idea - usually a concept, a quote or vision statement, a goal or process - and the trick is to find ideas that are richly interesting in their own right, but which also connect in the most stimulating and insightful ways with the ideas your colleagues play. The idea is "named" to a particular position on the board, and the player then claims links with the ideas in play in adjacent positions.

What does a HipBone board look like?

The standard HipBone board is known as the WaterBird board, and looks like this:

What's the payoff?

A HipBone board is like a mind-map, in that you place ideas in circles on the game-board, linked by those creative leaps of thought to other ideas which other players have come up with - but it pushes the limits of creativity farther than mind-mapping, by providing a "tight" formal structure in which the links must be made.

Players compete to find the most striking links, while collaborating to build the most brilliant structure of ideas.

Since the links consist of similarities and oppositions, homologies and analogies between the ideas in play, a full game of ten moves becomes a tightly woven joint architecture of ideas - and creates an almost telepathic melding of the minds and hearts of the various players.

To see a full game, please click through to:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/t/o/tob/570/waterbird/