Lid-Va!
The Values-Based Chair’s board game
Lid-VA! invites you to join a management team of an NGO dedicated to developing humanitarian projects around the world. The game will present you with different objectives for which you will have to form teams with people with diverse talents, skills, and characteristics.
Whether it’s to intervene in a humanitarian emergency, launch an educational project, or start a social awareness campaign, you will need to collaborate to choose the best candidates and put them to work to achieve shared goals.
Lid-VA! is a cooperative game that will test your leadership and team management skills. Are you ready to put your talent to work for building a better world?
Pedagogical Use of the Game
Beyond the game: a window to reflect on values-based leadership
Board games are much more than just a moment of fun. They are small social laboratories where, amidst laughter and strategies, patterns of communication and leadership, collaboration dynamics, and decision-making processes emerge that can say a lot about how we relate in other areas of life. LID-VA! does not explicitly talk about leadership or values, but it offers a fertile ground to observe and reflect on how we like to get involved, contribute, and share responsibilities. Do we like to guide others or prefer to follow? Do we wait for someone to take the initiative, or do we take it ourselves? What makes us feel more comfortable, and what tensions arise in the process?
Beyond whether the team wins or loses, this game allows us to explore the “how” we play: do we collaborate or compete? Do we listen to others or impose our vision? Do we accept mistakes as part of the process or experience them with frustration? Throughout the game, every decision, every interaction, and every gesture becomes an opportunity to better understand our way of participating and that of others. The sense of contribution and co-responsibility is not defined only in grand and solemn moments but in small acts that, within the framework of the game, are revealed in a natural and genuine way.
Thus, LID-VA! not only invites us to enjoy a shared challenge but also opens the door to essential questions: how do we like things to be led? How do we prefer to participate? What makes us truly engage in a common project? Questions that, without seeking absolute answers, can help us better understand how we relate to the world.
Because in the end, in the game and in life, the result matters… but the path to get there matters even more.
Guides for Observation and Reflection
The Game Brings Out Values
Observe the values that emerge throughout the game and how they translate into different behaviors of the players. How do they impact the group dynamics and the outcome of the game?
The game needs leadership
Different types of leadership help to mobilize wills and capacities towards a common goal or not; they make us feel that we contribute to the purpose or not; they motivate us or not. Different moments require different types of leadership, and different people can assume this role.
I am part of the game
My actions influence the development of the game. What types of behaviors do I identify with? How do they make me feel? What is my contribution to the objectives? When and how do I lead?
All of us are part of the group
The dynamics that arise among the different members of the group also influence the final outcome of the game and, equally or more importantly, how the different people feel. What group behaviors do we identify? How have we contributed to them? How have we felt?
The same game can generate different contexts
LID-VA! is a closed board game, with instructions that establish how it is played. In this sense, we have sought the formula that seemed most appropriate to us to ensure it can be used in very diverse contexts: from having a good time playing at home or with friends to being used in academic, social, or business contexts as a resource to start working or reflecting on leadership and values. For this reason, we did not want to incorporate values as components of the game and instead placed them in each of the players: their attitudes, behaviors, priorities…
The tokens and grids facilitate the observation and provocation of conversations and reflections by the players/observers about leadership, values, attitude in the game, or transfer to other environments.
But it is still possible to take it a step further: What if the rules are changed to generate completely different game situations? What would come out of it? Here are two proposals.
1.- Communication
In the original version of the game, partial communication between players is allowed. What if it is modified?
- Communication, spoken or with signals, between players can be eliminated. Each player will act only by seeing or interpreting the moves of the other players.
- Or all communication can be allowed: players can show their cards, announce planned moves, etc.
2.- Cooperation or Competition
LID-VA! was created as a cooperative game where the missions obtained by all players are added together. But it can easily be transformed into a competitive game, where the player who has achieved the most missions wins.
By changing just one of these elements, the game will change substantially, and new game situations will be generated from which new reflections can be drawn. We propose playing two games, incorporating some of these changes in one of them. Let’s see what happens!
