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Strategy game. By using this framework, teams can develop strategies that don’t focus on achieving goals but rather on defining winning strategies that will let them compete more effectively. This playful tool helps you understand your environment and the forces affecting all the players in your playground (competitors). It also helps you think like your competitors in order to develop a strategy that is competitive enough to win.

Think Like a Competitor, Win Like a Pro: A Strategic Game for Teams

When a team thinks about their strategy, they often don’t know where to start, how to think about their strengths, and how to best prioritize decisions. Around 8 years ago, I developed the Yomi (or Play to Win) workflow, which I use during meetings and workshops to help teams make certain decisions about the key criteria that will help them prioritize their activities, understand their strengths as a team and as a company, and also think like their competitors.

But especially, my goal is to help them think and create the mindset that the business environment is very much like a game — there are winners and losers, so you win or lose based on what others are doing.

That’s where this framework helps teams and companies think strategically about their decisions because it helps them consider their competitors and what they could be doing to stay ahead in the market.

So let me explain how it works.

Before you start:

Create between 2 to 4 teams. Each team needs at least 2 people, but you can have up to 15 or 18 in a single team. The ideal size, if you ask me, is between 4 to 10.
Each team will represent a company. There are multiple ways to do this. One or two teams can represent the company or brand you work for, and at least one other team MUST represent a competitor.

Now, each team needs to prepare before the meeting or workshop by researching the following:

What’s currently happening in the market?
What is the economic environment like? How could changes in the economy affect your company or product?
How could political changes affect your company or product?
How could technology impact your company or product?
And so on…

Almost like a PESTEL analysis, always finding what is happening in the market and how these events are affecting (positively or negatively) your goals, company, or product.Now, ask each team to evaluate and fully understand their strengths and opportunities as a company:

Where are they ahead of their competitors?
What seems to be the reason users/clients choose them over others?
What are their blockers and constraints? What should be considered as weaknesses when evaluating options?

During the meeting or workshop:

1️⃣ Get the card deck and choose 5 cards to be your criteria for choosing which priorities to focus on and how to win in the market. These are the top 5 strategic considerations when defining your winning strategy.

Share these with all teams.
Organize them from 1 to 5 in order of importance.

2️⃣ Now the game starts.

Right before that happens, each team member receives a role card.
There are only two roles: Team Member and YOMI (The Spy).
Each team must have at least one spy.

3️⃣ Rolling the dice and gathering insights.

Each team rolls the dice, and when they land on a number, they must find information about that while other teams play.
The better organized the team is, the more information and better decisions they can make.
Each turn, teams move to the correct section of the board based on the dice roll.
They work together to gather insights while reading the information other teams have found.
As teams find information, they add sticky notes to the board with their findings.

4️⃣ Moving up the ladder.

When team members roll the exact number required to move up, they advance to the strategy phase.
Once there, they can start defining their strategy.
The key difference here is that their strategy will remain secret — or at least that’s what they think.

5️⃣ Winning phase.

Teams have time to develop their strategy until they roll the exact number to enter the winning section.
At that moment, they can choose to keep playing or move to the winning phase.
Once one team enters the winning section, the other teams have two more rounds to continue playing.

6️⃣ The Spy Phase Begins.

Once the countdown starts, the Yomi cards (spies) return to their original teams and reveal everything they’ve learned.
Now, those teams have 45 minutes (or more, depending on your rules) to finalize their strategy based on the intelligence they’ve gathered.

7️⃣ Final presentations & investment round.

Once time is up, teams must present their strategy.
Everyone now turns into an investor, deciding where to invest their money based on which company has the best long-term and short-term potential.
The team with the highest investments wins.
This is the strategy that should be considered when defining real-world strategic plans for the year.

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