How do you use Lorcana cards during a workshop?

Ever used Pokémon cards or Dixit cards as a check-in before you start a meeting or workshop? Or maybe you’ve used them as an icebreaker before? Or maybe for an exercise like Silent Sorting?

If you answered no to any of these questions, be sure to read this post, but even if you answered yes everywhere, it may give you other ideas.

We have used Pokémon cards in the past to allow people to network with each other. With the Lorcana cards, we recently did something similar but more extensive.

Recently, a client had asked me to facilitate a tribe event with Serious Games after their quarterly planning. I got the brilliant idea to do the Serious Games completely in the theme of Disney. I myself collect Lorcana cards and remembered a team building from 2 years ago where I had used Pokémon cards as a starter.

I took hold of about 100 cards from Lorcana and immediately thought: I’m going to do something similar with this.

To begin, I divided the cards between two tables. I asked participants to choose a card they thought was cool, or because it was their favorite character. Other questions you could possibly ask:

• • Take a card according to how you are feeling right now.
  • Take a card that symbolizes a character trait of yours.

Surely give people about 5 minutes to look at the cards and pick one out. Give the next instruction only after everyone has a card.

In the next step (2) ask that everyone find a partner to whom they are going to explain why they chose that particular card. Give each other a maximum of 1 min to do this. Be sure to put a limit on this that you also check yourself, by making a signal after 2 min so they start looking for another partner. You can do 3 rounds for this, but I wanted them to interact with as many team members as possible, so there have been about 5-6. I gave them an additional assignment needed for the next step. And that assignment was: memorize as many cards as possible.

In this third step, I asked everyone to silently arrange themselves from smallest Disney character to largest Disney character. You will see that after a few minutes people will line up. This will not always happen in complete silence and you will have to remind people. I gave them 3 minutes to do this. With this group, it took about two minutes.

Once they lined up, I went down the row and looked them all in the eye. Without knowing who had which card, I said to some: you are not standing correctly. After going down the line, I told the group that my gut tells me that your order is not completely correct (with the large group I had (36 people) there will always be a mistake somewhere 😁.

At that, I gave them the final assignment. In this round, you make sure you are in the right place. You may talk, but you may not say what Disney character you have. You may, however, describe your Disney character’s major. You may not show your card. Here again, 3 minutes to arrive at a result.

After the three minutes, I asked everyone to hold their card in front of them and went down the line again. Everyone was pretty much in the right place.

From here we moved on to the debriefing.

In the debriefing, I asked the following questions:

1. How did the first round go? What were you thinking while looking for your spot?
2. How did the second round go? What made you have a better order in that round than the first?
3. What round do you experience the most in your team? What action can we take to improve it?

Without really knowing what the activity would yield in this experiment, I learned a lot from it. During the facilitation, I thought of variations/improvements that could be applied in a future session. The group in itself found it to be a teachable moment. On the one hand getting to know many people from the Tribe, and on the other hand taking a moment to reflect on how they do things.

You will probably also think of other things you can do differently. In fact, I encourage you to take this exercise to your liking and put down your own version. In fact, I’d love to hear your feedback if you’ve applied this to your teams. 😀