Making the first weeks something people want to play
Nobody reads an onboarding wiki front to back. So I turned ours into a game, with bite-sized lessons, a map to explore, and real colleagues as the guides.
- Role
- Designer and builder
- Tools
- Browser game, Confluence, Claude
- Scope
- Every new hire
- Reading time
- 2 minutes
Our new-hire “start here” page did its job, technically. It linked to everything a new person needed. It just gave all of it equal weight and no order, so on Day 2 nobody could tell whether the acronym cheat sheet mattered more than the process library.
The problem wasn’t that onboarding needed to be fun. It was that the page couldn’t do three things: put content in the right order, check that people understood it, and show them their progress. A game can do all three. Fun is just how you get people to finish.
Steal the structure, not the chaos
I started from the idea of a cooking game like Overcooked, then kept only one part of it: the map. You drive a little van around a world, each landmark is a short level, and finishing levels earns stars that open the next area.
The frantic, timed part had to go. A new hire failing a timed level in their first week is exactly the wrong feeling. There’s one timed bonus round, the Acronym Arcade, and it’s optional.
Every level is a snack, not a meal
Each landmark is a level of three to five cards. One idea per card, about 60 words, one visual. A whole level, quiz included, takes under four minutes, so someone can finish one between Day 1 sessions.
The last card in every level is “Go deeper,” which links to the exact page in our wiki that the card came from. The wiki stays the source of truth. The game teaches the 20% people need in their first week and points to the rest.
See inside one level
Card 4 of 5
Onboarding is a journey, not a race. Finish a level between sessions and come back whenever you like. New districts open as your first weeks go on.
Go deeper in the wikiProve it
Do you need to finish every level on Day 1?
- Yes, before your first meeting
- No, districts open week by week
- Only the timed ones
Unlocks that pull people back
Stars are the only thing that gates progress. Districts open on a mix of the calendar and stars earned, so nobody rushes ahead on Day 1 and nobody stalls because they skipped a level.
On top of that sit cosmetic unlocks for the van and badges that feel like the company rather than a generic app. And the guides are real colleagues as characters, so a new hire meets the people behind each part of the business before they’ve met them on a call.
Built to stay current
The fastest way for an onboarding game to die is for its content to go stale. So every card lives in one content file, separate from the game code, with its source page, its owner, and the date it was last reviewed. Owners get a quarterly nudge. Editing a card never means touching the game.
What I’ll watch
How much of each cohort finishes the first districts by the end of Week 1. How often people click through to go deeper. First-try accuracy on every quiz question, because a question most people miss usually means the card is badly written. And whether new hires say, at their 30-day check-in, that they understand how the company works.
The goal isn’t a fun game. It’s a first week where nobody has to guess what matters.