Card Games Are Going Back Into the Workplace, and Companies Are Paying for Them

The Games Experience runs its first paid corporate session for sales agents at local New York Life office

SAN RAMON, CA, UNITED STATES, September 28, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Sixteen sales agents at New York Life's San Ramon office recently spent their lunch hour playing a card game about selling insurance. It was the first paid corporate booking for The Games Experience, and by the end of it several of the agents had asked how to run sessions themselves.

The Games Experience is a set of facilitated conversation games played with printed cards. A facilitator reads a prompt, players respond in turn, and the group votes on the best answer. No screens, no apps, no accounts. Sessions run one to three hours and are priced from $200 to $400 depending on length.

The format was developed over the past year through free events for community and civic groups in the East Bay, including a Danville National Night Out gathering and a session for seniors at the Belmont Center. New York Life is the first company to book one.

The session was built to order. Told in advance that the team wanted to work on customer relationships, closing and accountability, founder Gini Graham Scott, PhD, designed a new game called Sell It! and had the cards written, designed, printed and cut inside two days.

Most of the participants said they would attend another session and a majority expressed interest in hosting one. The company manager who arranged for the session called the event fantastic.

The written feedback pointed to something beyond a break from the working day. Participants described the session as a way to look at their business through a different lens, to have discussions they would not normally have, and to practice explaining their thinking out loud. One wrote that the group had brainstormed together, and that they had learned what to say and how to say it.

Scott has since taken the program directly to local businesses, exhibiting at the San Ramon Chamber Expo, where she met with companies and community groups interested in hosting game events of their own, from team building to fundraisers.

Workplace sessions run in two formats: existing games on topics from brainstorming to health, and custom games built around an issue a company wants to work through. Scott is now recruiting and training facilitators to run sessions independently, with facilitators taking half the fee.

The games themselves come from ALB Games, which has published more than 100 games in book form and thirty as audiobooks, on subjects including relationships, success, travel, history, scams and crime. The company is developing mobile versions and an online community for players and game designers.

Scott is a sociologist with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and a JD from the University of San Francisco. She has published more than 250 books, over 50 with major publishers, and has designed more than 150 games. She is currently writing a series on games in the workplace, examining why teams that talk to each other outperform teams that do not.

Companies interested in booking a session, and anyone interested in training as a facilitator, can contact changemakerspub@att.net.

Jana Collins
Jones & O'Malley
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