Common Ground: designing a card game to teach teamwork principles.

Why it mattered

A team can be lectured about collaboration, or it can be handed a system where the only way to win is to collaborate. I designed the mechanics that make “success is earned as a team” a rule, not a slogan.

Role

Game Design Lead

Owned the rule system: turn structure, energy economy, cardholder rotation, and scoring.

Timeline

Jan–May 2024

One-quarter UW HCDE Directed Research Group

Team

10-person team

Collaborative mechanism design, card system, playtesting, and rulebook production.

Skills

Game systems and rule design
Turn structure + feedback loops
Economy and balance tuning
Playtesting + iteration

Flip to see it in play

Common Ground hero: the physical cards laid out on a table beside the four final card designs for Personal Resource, Teamwork Principle, Weekly Challenge, and Shenanigans

The brief: turn a teamwork lecture into a card game.

Instead of telling students to collaborate, we wanted the rules to make collaboration the only viable way to win.

Learning goalUnderstand how individuals contribute to a team.

Behavior to createDiscuss, contribute, and decide together.

Game systemPool personal resources to solve shared challenges.

Concept origin

We started with a well: what one person knows is often invisible to the team.

The course metaphor gave us the bridge from teamwork theory to a playable system. The game needed to reveal those hidden resources, then make exchanging them necessary.

A hand-drawn well with a bucket lowered on a rope labelled Self-Awareness. Below the waterline the page fills with handwritten qualities: values, mental models, insecurities, imposter syndrome, perspective, cognitive biases, content expertise, resilience, empathy — **Each person has a well.**Values, skills, and lived experience sit below the surface.

Make the invisible discussable

A hand-drawn page of several wells, each with its own bucket, and buckets travelling on lines between them — **A team moves between wells.**Progress depends on surfacing and combining what each person can contribute.

Hidden knowledgePersonal Resource cardsShared decisions

My design question

How can a card game make collaboration the optimal strategy, so players learn teamwork by playing well rather than by being told to cooperate?

What I owned

I originated the game concept and co-designed the cards, then led printing, classroom testing, and iteration across three versions.

Outcome

A complete physical teaching kit: the final card deck, card box, and visual rulebook. Played in class, it can be run independently to teach teamwork principles.

3classroom playtests

60+student players

3full game iterations

The design process

ResearchGame Design Analysis

DesignIdeation & Low-Fi Design

DesignFirst Game Iteration

PlaytestBeta Playtest

PlaytestDelta Playtest

SynthesisTesting Analysis

DesignSecond Game Iteration

PlaytestFinal Playtest

I translated an abstract teamwork model into actions at the table.

The key move was separating what one player holds from what the whole team can create.

Personal Resource card for Empathy — Each player holdsPersonal ResourcesSkills, knowledge, and energy

Teamwork Principle card — The team craftsA shared PrincipleBuilt only through contribution

Weekly Challenge card — Together they clearThe weekly ChallengeOne score for the whole table

Concept map

Five lenses for reading teamwork

Empathy Communication Self-awareness Problem solving Organization

Playable translation

Resources turn individual knowledge and traits into cards a player can contribute.
Principles combine those resources into observable team behaviors.
Challenges place those behaviors inside a stage of team development.
Shenanigans introduce the uncertainty teams must adapt to.

Source artifact Teamwork principle concept map The full research map behind the deck. Open only when you want the detailed taxonomy.

Full teamwork principle concept map connecting individual capacities, teamwork behaviors, challenges, and team dynamics

Limited energy

Every action spends energy, so no player can solve everything alone.

Rotating authority

The Cardholder changes every round.

Shared progress

Each week advances one tracker; the table wins or loses as a team.

The mechanism emerged through increasingly playable prototypes.

We moved from research and game analysis to a whiteboard economy, then ran the entire loop in sticky notes before designing finished cards.

Affinity wall, early sketches, and published cooperative games used for analysis — **01 / Decode**Mapped teamwork concepts and dissected cooperative games.

Ravine analysis beside the first draft of the Common Ground game loop — **02 / Borrow a pattern**A shared threat made the table start talking.

Whiteboard separating personal player resources from shared team gameplay — **03 / Build the economy**Separated private resources from shared outcomes.

Full game layout prototyped using color-coded sticky notes — **04 / Make it playable**Ran the complete loop before designing a card.

Design principle

Do not print “work together” on a card. Make individual success impossible without contribution from the table.

Eight weeks. Four phases per week. One shared score.

The team clears workplace challenges by combining the right resources into Teamwork Principles before energy runs out.

A complete Common Ground game in progress with cards, player mats, energy tokens, and a shared progress tracker

Team objective

Clear each Challenge before the week ends.

Every player must contribute.
Energy spent cannot be reused.
Only shared Principles score.

Monday
Reveal the Challenge

Choose up to three Principles that could solve it.
Mid-week
Build Principles

Pool matching Resources. Every player contributes a card or energy.
Friday
Resolve Shenanigans

A wildcard may restore energy or disrupt the plan.
Weekend
Score and Rotate

Advance the team tracker and pass the Cardholder clockwise.

57 final prints Five functional families

25Resources
5Principles
8Challenges
15Shenanigans
4Setup

Resources and Principles carry the concept map into play; Challenges follow Tuckman’s stages; Shenanigans model uncertainty; Setup cards scaffold the first round.

25 Resources

What I can contribute

Personal knowledge and traits become something a player can offer.

Origin: individual capacities

5 Principles

What we build together

Resources combine into an observable team behavior.

Origin: teamwork conditions

8 Challenges

What the team must solve

Each scenario asks for the behavior needed at that team stage.

Origin: Tuckman’s five stages

15 Shenanigans

What changes the plan

Unexpected friction forces the group to adapt together.

Origin: uncertainty and recovery

Weeks 1–2FormingMeet and define roles

Weeks 3–4StormingNavigate conflict

Weeks 5–6NormingBuild shared habits

Week 7PerformingAct with fluency

Week 8AdjourningReflect and close

Tuckman’s model sets the difficulty curve: each Challenge asks for the kind of teamwork that phase requires.

A visual grammar players could read at table speed.

I led the card system from early annotations to print-ready components. Type signals hierarchy; color identifies function before a player reads a word.

Typography

M PLUS Rounded 1c

Friendly enough for a classroom game, structured enough for instructions and repeated scanning.

AaExtra BoldCard roles and actions

AaMediumPrompts and labels

AaRegularRules and annotations

Card families

Function becomes color.

Each family keeps one saturated action color and one quiet support tint.

Resource #68BBFF#D2EBFF

Challenge #FF6565#FFD1D1

Principle #86C844#DBEFC7

Shenanigans #CA933C#F2DFC0

At a glance: blue is what a player holds, green is what the team builds, red is what the team must solve, and ochre is what disrupts the plan.

I tuned the system against real classrooms, not my own assumptions.

Three classroom sessions showed us what to preserve, what to rebalance, and where players were getting lost.

Four survey result charts, 24 responses each: Was the game fun (mostly 4s), How difficult was the game (clustered at 2 and 3), Were the game rules clear (spread flat across 2, 3 and 4), and Did it feel relevant to the class (mostly 4s and 5s) — **Beta survey, 24 responses**The four questions we asked the class.

Four photos from the beta play test: a full classroom of students playing in teams with a countdown timer projected on two screens, a table of four students mid-round, and two close-ups of the paper cards, energy tokens and progress tracker in play — **Where the data came from**~30 students, timed rounds, one room.

Beta survey averages

24 responses · five-point scale

3.9/5 Fun

4.0/5 Course relevance

2.9/5 Rule clarity

2.6/5 Difficulty

Difficulty is a calibration measure: 2.6/5 landed inside the target band.

Test verdict

Players understood why to play before they understood how to begin.

Validated

Fun, relevance, and difficulty landed where we wanted them.

Friction

2.9/5 rule clarity exposed an onboarding problem, not a broken game economy.

Signal2.9/5 rule clarityPlayers liked the game but needed a better entry point.

Design decisionBuild a visual rulebookComponents, four phases, and one fully worked week.

Final behaviorThe room ran itselfTeams played from the book instead of waiting for us.

The full Common Ground rulebook: a front cover reading “Common Ground, the Teamwork Trial” followed by 23 rule pages covering the goal, setup, table layout, the four weekly phases, every component, and a fully worked example round — **The rulebook**All 23 pages. Rules 4–7 are the four phases; 16–23 walk a full week, move by move.

Close-up of the final printed cards, energy tokens and player mats mid-game — **The final print**57 cards across five functional families, plus the shared energy economy.

A full classroom of roughly thirty students playing the finished game in teams, with table setup instructions projected on two screens — **The final play test**A full class, running themselves off the rulebook.

Designing this game changed how I think about rules as behaviour design.

The energy budget and shared score did the teaching. One team lost to a bad Shenanigans draw and still wrote: “Life happens. Good teamwork prevails.” The rules created the lesson.

Handwritten reflection notes from players after the final session, including one reading: collaborating during this game was fun, and a great representation of teamwork. We got second place due to unfortunate shenanigan cards. The lesson: Life happens. Good teamwork prevails. — **Reflection sheets**What players wrote after the final session.

What I learned

Constraints teach better than instructions. The interdependence players felt came from what the rules made impossible, not from prompts telling them to cooperate, and the playtest data confirmed that clarity rather than concept was the gap.

What I would test next

I’d A/B different energy budgets and cardholder-rotation rules to find which variant best sustains collaboration and post-game reflection, and prototype a digital version to capture play data at scale.

Ask me about the mechanics