Although every game is different, this fictional account will give you a taste of what it is like to play the Game of Games™.

Week One: Because you have a project that you’ve wanted to finish, you’re excited to be playing the Game of Games™. It’s a book proposal about your life: a memoir. You’ve actually written a few chapters, but writing has come slow these past months.

Your initial game proposal, submitted after you enrolled in the game, was to complete the entire book within the 12 weeks of the Game (ten weeks, plus two "off" weeks). But after an individual goal clarification session with Emilio -- a bonus that you hadn’t expected – you decided that an approach that best suited the time parameters of the game would be to create an outline of the book and submit the outline plus the sample chapters to a publisher or agent.

Despite your excitement, you nonetheless have some anxiety about the first Game of Games™ conference call. You can see on the Internet scoreboard that there are people who have wildly different goals than yours. There’s a guy who wants to create 50 streams of passive income and another guy who wants to find friends and connections in a city to which he’ll soon relocate. There’s also a woman whose goal is to dissolve all sense of obligations in her life and another woman who is a coach and wants to attract ten additional clients.

You start to wonder. How am I going to fit in?

Week Two: Actually, the first call exceeded your expectations. It was tremendously fun, even exhilarating! You found yourself resonating with the woman with the obligation thing. That sounded like a goal you could see yourself adopting – well, maybe after you finished your book.

During that first call, players were given three minutes each to outline their game goals. Each of the players had a form they’d been previously been e-mailed that listed criteria for clearly defined goals. As each player described their goal on the call, everyone took notes, voiced the highlights, and then e-mailed their notes to the other players. During the time between calls, each of the players had the option of using this feedback to improve or clarify their goal. You spent part of the subsequent week doing just that.

Week Three: It had taken you about this long to get accustomed to perhaps the most unusual aspect of the Game of Games™ -- awarding points and voting. During each of the preceding weeks, you had distributed six points each week to the players you thought had made the best progress towards their goal. At the same time, you had voted for the players who you thought were most creative, best helpers, or who had done the most to make the game fun.

At first it felt weird, but then you got accustomed to it. It was cool that a couple of days after you voted you saw the results of the point distribution and voting on the Internet Scoreboard. What actually got you liking the process was getting voted the Best Accelerator or helper of other players. You hadn’t expected to win anything! But it proved to be a dubious prize. Because you were voted first in a category, you were thrown into a pool of other winners, one of whom would be randomly assigned a Wildcard. That random assignee proved to be you. The wildcard said that you’d be the center of the group’s focus on the Week Four call.

You weren’t sure you wanted the spotlight. You just wanted to fit in.

Week Four: At first it felt a little embarrassing to be one of the two focus people on the Week Four call. But it sure proved useful.

You played a game Emilio called "Strength and Improvables." You started by revealing the core elements of the plan you’d developed. While you were doing this, Emilio asked the rest of the group to write down and brainstorm two lists simultaneously: strengths and improvables. These were things that were strong about your plan and things they thought could be improved. One idea that emerged was one you simply hadn’t thought of before. Why not, said one of the players, publish part of the memoir as an e-book and place it on your website? That way, you could get some immediate feedback plus have an interim measure of accomplishment. You had read about e-books, but just hadn’t thought this was something you could do.

Week Five: It took a little doing, but you published your first e-book! Actually, it wasn’t a whole book, but the first two chapters of your memoir. In the interim between calls, you also received an e-mail from one of the other players. She – Wanda, the coach wanting additional clients -- had some helpful leads on publishers. The leads helped motivate you to put the finishing touches on your outline. You also rewrote your two sample chapters. You resolved by Week Nine’s call to have them and the outline ready to send to publishers.

Week Six: It seems impossible, but the Game is more than half over! Not only that, but you’ve already completed almost your entire original goal. You sent out a group e-mail to other players announcing that fact and inviting for reflections on how to now reconfigure your goal.

During the Week Six call, Amanda – the woman with the obligation thing – was the spotlight of the game play. Emilio used a structured activity that had Amanda detailing her obligations by levels: personal, emotional, societal etc. Steve – the passive income guy – asked Amanda what you thought was a provocative question. Weren’t there some obligations – particularly the societal ones – that she wanted to keep? You could see that Steve was going to get the group award for Master Accelerator – best helper of other players. You wouldn’t have thought it possible for such a numbers guy!

Week Seven: This for you was the most enjoyable activity of the entire game. It occurred offline, outside of the game call. It was an e-mail game Emilio called a modified version of the Delphi Game. The way it worked was that all participants were asked to prepare a questionnaire based on their perception of their game goal challenge. They were then instructed to send it out to 10 people they respected. Then, everybody had to summarize the responses and send them back to the respondents for their reactions. They were asked to continue this process until there was consensus.

You – being you – decided to alter the game activity slightly. After you got the first round of responses, you instead convened a teleconference with your respondents. You used it to poll the respondents on the memoir sections they found most compelling. It felt fun and useful. Their feedback made you decide to cut out a section in the manuscript that didn’t generate any feedback and expand a section respondents found particularly compelling.

Week Eight: Emilio through the group a curveball! What happened was John, the relocation guy, was awarded a wildcard. The wildcard told him he could earn additional points if he took practical steps to accelerate another player’s progress. To make a long story short, he chose you. It turned out he’d been holding back on the group. In a previous life, before he got involved in real estate (of all things!), he’d been a publisher. He volunteered to redo your book proposal, edit your sample chapters and help you repackage your material. Needless to say, you delightedly accepted.

Week Nine: The game is almost over but you don’t want it to end. John’s input into your process proved extraordinarily useful. It dovetailed neatly with the "Launching and Fulfilling" or implementation phase of the Game. During this phase, players were to be awarded bonus points for steps in actually implementing game goals. You were ready for this one. You sent the newly revised package out in the mail and prepared to crow about your progress during the Week Ten call.

Week Ten: The end of the Game is here. The scoreboard compiled the final votes. Voila! You got two prizes: one for Master Achiever and the other for Master Accelerator. The first earned you a rebate on your game fee. The second earned you a gift certificate for Amazon. Best news of all was that your e-book chapter drew a letter of inquiry from a publisher. You felt like you’d more then done what you’d set out to do when you signed up to play the game. In fact, it felt incredibly good to see yourself as a Master Player of the Game of Games.