Introduction

The “Penny Game” or “Coin Game” vividly demonstrates the principles of flow, batch sizes, and hand-offs. It allows participants to physically move coins in varied batch sizes, visually emphasizing smaller batches’ swift, consistent movement compared to larger ones.

This engaging and enlightening activity provides crucial insights into process improvement, motivating teams to rethink and optimize their work practices for superior efficiency and productivity.

Use Cases

The penny game is a great way to introduce the concept of flow, batch sizes, and hand-offs to teams and leaders. It helps illustrate the benefits of WiP (Work in Progress) limits and the risks of building up large queues.

Key Features

• Choose how to flip. You can choose a more “flip like” swipe motion or a double click to flip the coins.
• Manual hand-offs. You can enable manual hand-offs better mimicking a real penny game where players have to slide the coins to the next player.
• Customizable rounds. You can choose the number of game rounds.
• Per-coin statistics. Illustrate spread with per-coin statistics at the end of the game, showing the correlation between spread and batch size.

How to Use

• Decide on a role: facilitator or participant.
• Additional options can be found in More settings:
  • Choose the number of game rounds.
  • Select your coin “flip” method - drag swipe is default, double click is an alternative.
  • Enable manual hand-offs for players to press a “Deliver” button to move coins forward.

Tips and Tricks

• If you have players on different devices, or some players using touchpads, choose the double click flip method.