How a silent card game helps students develop intercultural communication skills

Small groups of students play a simple trick-taking card game, each with a slightly different, unstated variation of the rules. No talking is allowed; players can use only gestures to communicate. Periodically, one player from each table rotates to a new group, carrying their own version of “the rules” with them, unaware that these differ from their classmates’.

This is Barnga, a simple game that reveals how hidden assumptions shape communication and collaboration. It’s an activity I often use to develop intercultural communication skills in the classroom. As university classrooms become increasingly diverse, these are skills that many educators struggle to help students develop and that tools such as artificial intellidence have limited capacity to support.  

What simulation card game Barnga does in silence

The mechanics of Barnga, which Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan developed in 1980 while doing aid work in Liberia, are deliberately unremarkable. But the game is not really about cards. It is about watching a room full of confident, capable people slowly discover that their confidence rests on an assumption: that everyone around them operates according to the same logic as they do. When that assumption breaks, the reactions are instructive. Some students get defensive. Some go quiet and disengage. Some try to dominate the table through sheer gestural insistence. A few laugh and adapt. Almost none predict, going in, which of these people they will turn out to be.

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This is the part no reading assignment replicates: students do not merely learn that hidden norms exist. They experience the specific, slightly uncomfortable realisation that their norm was never universal while the moment is happening to them, with real consequences at the table.

The soft skills underneath the game

Strip away the cards, and Barnga players are rehearsing workplace skills that resist being taught as content. They must read ambiguity in real time without language, sit with frustration instead of shutting down, watch their assumptions fail. They see group roles emerge under pressure rather than be assigned in a case study. 

Crucially, the sense of connection that Barnga produces doesn’t come from discovering common ground nor from confirming difference. It comes from repairing a misunderstanding with another person, gesture by gesture. Students can’t retreat into assuming that everyone shares their rules, and they can’t write off a confused partner as too different to reach. The small, earned relief of finally being understood is what shifts a student from cautious withdrawal to active participation – and it’s the same mechanism behind workplace belonging. Teams bond not because everyone thinks alike but because they prove that friction can be worked through. 

By immersing students in a scenario where participants must navigate unfamiliar rules without verbal explanation, the activity builds observation, empathy, adaptability, intercultural awareness and the capacity to work through ambiguity.

These are precisely the “soft skills” that employers struggle to hire for because they are notoriously hard to ascertain from a CV or interview answer.

What the post-play debrief reveals

For students and educator, the post-game debrief is an essential step. The deeper intercultural lessons emerge in the conversation right after play. 

Students consistently describe the same arc: a jolt of frustration when the rules stopped making sense, followed by quiet adaptation as they began reading gestures rather than insisting on their own version of “correct”. Then, almost without exception, someone says they had assumed everyone would share their rules. This same assumption is exactly what happens when a person moves to a new country, a new classroom or a new workplace. Nobody announces their hidden norms on arrival; newcomers discover them, one small collision at a time.

What changes afterwards is visible in the room itself. Group activities that follow the debrief run with noticeably less friction: students check in with each other more readily, ask clarifying questions and recover faster from misunderstandings. The frustration that dominated the game gives way to a more durable sense of connection and engagement not because students learned to avoid friction but because they have already survived it together.

Where low-tech tools can support intercultural learning

Barnga requires distinctly analogue tools: a modified card deck, rule sheets, and pencils and paper for drawing. Its hands-on nature reflects the fact that intercultural competence is ultimately developed through interaction with real people. Activities such as card games expose students to uncertainty, misunderstanding and adaptation in ways that no AI-driven tool can replicate. AI can help students explore cultural frameworks, communicate across language barriers and reflect on their experiences, but it is less effective in helping them build the empathy, flexibility and self-awareness needed in diverse classrooms and workplaces. 

The message for educators and students about the role of discomfort

For educators, the implication is to protect space for structured, embodied discomfort. A 20-minute card game, followed by discussion-based debrief, can teach more about hidden norms than an entire unit on cultural-dimensions theory, because it converts an abstract concept into a personal experience.

The takeaway is not a call to abandon technology. For students entering a global, increasingly hybrid workforce, technical fluency with AI tools is important, but it will not substitute for noticing when a colleague’s silence means confusion rather than agreement, or when a rule you assumed was universal was simply yours. Employers are not looking for people who can define cultural intelligence. They are looking for people who have been quietly, uncomfortably wrong in a room with strangers and learned something from it.

Barnga’s real lesson may be this: some competencies can only be built through experience that AI, however capable, is structurally unable to provide. The classroom’s job is to keep making room for that experience.

Nasreen Sultana is lecturer in international business and management at the University of Queensland.

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