red balloonHere’s a game that will help you while you have fun: Balloon Brigade. I found out about it in Ben Paynter’s article, “Level Up: Play This Game, Get That Job” in Bloomberg Businessweek, and I’m so glad he featured it because this is a tool that even small businesses can use to assess people’s skills.

This month, the company Knack released their Balloon Brigade app, which was created for companies, but really is a game that involves throwing water balloons at your enemies. You play the game by commanding the Balloon Brigade to defend the Liquonians from the Combustable army by throwing water balloons at them, and you also protect your flowers from getting burned alive. In order to figure out what works against the invaders, you have to adjust the strength of the balloons and decide how much to fill them. As you use strategy to fight the enemy off, the app collects the data to assess your strengths. So it’s not just about the points you get but how you get them, which reveals how you make real-world decisions at work.

I also like the reason why the company, founded by Guy Halfteck, created it: Halfteck wasn’t successful at getting a job that he interviewed for, so he hired a team to develop the game so that people can be assessed in additional ways. Paynter says that Shell has used it, but any-sized business can use it for their current employees and when they’re looking for new talent.

Knack has created something that will help companies think outside the box, and I predict others are going to develop more apps that will look like games and be just as fun, but also go beyond the usual methods businesses use to test management skills, or whatever they’re looking for.

It’s free, and you can get it at iTunes.

If you’ve used it, let me know in the comments below.