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Standup Bingo
Quick game for daily standup meetings
15 prompts on a 3×3 grid, themed Classic. Row, column and diagonal wins.
About this template
Standups are supposed to take 15 minutes. They almost never do. Standup Bingo is a quick-play card that tracks the ways a daily standup goes sideways — the chronic late joiner, the ticket that's been 'in progress' for six days, the person who unmutes three sentences late, the rabbit-hole that derails the whole meeting.
The small 3×3 grid is intentional — it keeps things fast. One standup is usually enough to fill two or three rows, and a full week of standups will fill the card several times over. Keep it private, keep it kind, and use it to laugh at the bits of agile that have stopped serving you.
When to use it
- Daily or thrice-weekly engineering standups.
- Scrum meetings where the same five problems recur.
- Remote standups where camera etiquette is loose.
- Sprint planning sessions that drift into status updates.
Variations
- Blocker bingo — squares are every possible blocker ('waiting on design', 'waiting on QA', 'waiting on legal'). A dark game.
- Carry-over bingo — all squares describe ways people describe work that didn't finish yesterday. Depressing but accurate.
- Velocity bingo — squares track story-point gymnastics: re-estimation mid-sprint, stories split in half, points quietly moved into next sprint with a wink.
What's on the card
All 15 prompts included on this card:
- · "Nothing blocking me"
- · Someone forgot to unmute
- · Ticket still in progress
- · "Same as yesterday"
- · Standup runs over 15 min
- · Someone missing from call
- · Jira board pulled up
- · "I'll look into it today"
- · Sprint goal mentioned
- · Someone multitasking
- · PR review requested
- · Merge conflict mentioned
- · "Carry over from yesterday"
- · Awkward hand-raise to speak
- · Someone joins 5 min late
Questions people ask
Is 3×3 too small?
For a 15-minute meeting, 3×3 is perfect — you can often fill a row before standup ends. 5×5 makes the game span a full week of standups, which can also be fun.
What's the point?
Morale, mostly. Standup Bingo is an acknowledgement that standups are a bit silly. Playing it privately gives you something to do while someone explains a ticket for the fourth day running.