The ability to recognize and articulate words and simple phrases will help prepare you for more complex linguistic tasks, and to cope with basic social situations long before you can juggle the more arcane aspects of German's sometimes convoluted syntax.
With German vocabulary, at least, English speakers have a head start, for English is a member of the German family of languages. German has many words that are cognates of English words---that is, words that are similar in sound and spelling to their English counterparts because they are derived from the same root words. Thus English "good" is German "gut," "good morning" is "guten morgen," "thank you" is "danke," and "garden" is "garten."
The website Digital Dialects offers an array of learning games for many languages, including German (see References). The German page tests vocabulary for numbers, food, animals, clothing, and fruits and vegetables. Standard verbs and their basic conjugations are also covered. The games challenge you to match English with German words, match German words to images (or colors), or match the German verb form to the right pronoun.
You can find more challenging German language games at the language pages of the Transparent Language website (see Resources). These include a word seek game (in which you hunt for German words lost in a block of letters); a plug-n-play game (in which you provide the missing text of a phrase or paragraph); and an unscrambling game (in which you shuffle a group of words so that it makes a coherent sentence).
Go to Language Games for hangman and crossword games (see Resources). The University of Northern Iowa (UNI) offers a gateway page to many different sites with German language games, as well as other German language resources.
Once you have gained a certain degree of knowledge and proficiency in German, it's time for one more game: finding some native speakers of German and trying to talk to them. Many may be inclined to switch to English when they hear you stumble in their native tongue. Because English is the most widely used lingua franca, Germans, like many peoples around the world, tend to learn English sooner and better than English speakers learn Deutsch or any other foreign tongue. So the first step in the game is to find a German speaker willing to humor you.
Viel Glück!