The Ultimate Retrospective cards
Why this card deck?
A while ago - somewhere in October 2023 - Chris Stone posted this image on LinkedIn: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Retrospectives. A list of 48 questions, grouped by type of question:
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Who?
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What?
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Where?
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When?
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Why?
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How?
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He got a lot of reactions on this cheat sheet. But 1 really stood out for me, the reaction of Eddy Bruin of The Serious Gamers: "That's a nice set of questions. Since there are 48....why not create a card deck out of them?" My response? "Challenge accepted". And so these 48 questions in 6 categories got transformed into a card deck of 48 cards, with matching visual. In the meantime we could think about how we could use these cards in a gamified retrospective. Because a deck of cards offers a lot more possible usages than a sheet with 48 questions...
More about the sheet on Chris' website.
What is this card deck?
It is literally the transformation of the 48 questions to a deck of 48 cards, including 6 theme cards. The color scheme is taken over without modification and each theme got a corresponding visual:
Each theme also corresponds to a die value. That opens possibilities to use the card deck in a gamified retro context.
Get your copy of this deck! Check this page.
How to use this card deck?
There are literally countless ways to use this card deck. We explored a few ways ourselves to get you started. You can find these on the following page.
What about remote teams?
We thought about that too. You probably know that Chris Stone has a large collection of retro templates for Miro and Mural on his website. In order to use these cards in a distributed team context, I created some randomizers:
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