The top 13 games we play as a remote team!
They require zero skills, paid tools, and only minimal time to prepare... just a group of willing participants and a little bit of time at the end of a meeting.
Quick Games and IceBreakers
Something to implement into a Friday afternoon call, coffee chats, or even the beginning of longer meetings to learn something new about your colleagues and loosen up the atmosphere a little.
GeoGuessr ⭐⭐
In GeoGuessr, players are presented with 5 random Street View locations. You can search around and see if you can figure out where you are in the world. As soon as you have an idea where it might be, you pop a pin and guess. The closer you are the more points you get 🎉
Rating: 2 stars. We enjoy a good game of Geo Guessing but sometimes it’s really difficult to find out where you are which slightly impacts motivation at times.
Quizzes ⭐⭐⭐
There are different quizzes available and we’ve tried a couple of them. They can be good conversation starters and help to learn more about a certain topic. You can even create your own quizzes around a new hire or to celebrate someone's birthday.
Rating: 3 stars.
Dressing Up Virtually ⭐⭐⭐
Remember the costume or motto days back in school? We are using the video filter feature that zoom offers to have a similar experience with the team. Sometimes we dress up for a reason (celebrating someone's birthday) but to be honest, we don’t really need a reason to dress up, do you?
Rating: 3 stars. Results in pretty fun team pictures as well.
Pictionary ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Discover the next Picasso in your team with Pictionary. One person gets a word and starts drawing while the rest of the team is guessing what they are drawing. It’s fun, competitive and engaging. We love it.
Rating: 4 stars.
Ice Breaker Questions ⭐⭐⭐⭐
A quickie to learn more about your team and “break the ice”. Our top five:
- The zombie apocalypse is coming, who are 3 people you want on your team?
- If a movie was made of your life what genre would it be, and who would play you?
- You have to sing karaoke, what song do you pick?
- If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life what would it be?
- What’s your favorite place in the world and why?
Rating: 4 stars. There are no limits and it’s a great way to build personal relationships and get to know each other a little better every day in only 5 minutes.
Haxball ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Our all-time favorite and the only game that has its own slack channel. Haxball is a physics-based multiplayer soccer game. where teamwork is key. A great way to interact with your teammates, play a game together, laugh and have fun.
Rating: 5 stars.
Longer Games and Activities
If you want to dedicate 1 hour + towards your teambuilding, these are some games and activities we can recommend. We use them for our remote PassionLIVEs, monthly team sessions or
Book Club ⭐⭐⭐
Many Passioneers are into reading books or listening to audiobooks or podcasts. Exchanging on the books we’ve read, giving recommendations, and sharing learnings is a great way to learn and grow together and get new perspectives.
Rating: 3 stars.
Cooking Class ⭐⭐⭐⭐
We’re foodies. So in addition to our #cooking slack channel, we have cooking sessions quite regularly. For a cooking class one Passioneer volunteers and prepares a recipe. The other team members receive a list of ingredients they have to get before the class and then the whole team cooks together via zoom and enjoy their meal together.
Rating: 4 stars.
Trivia ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Old but gold. A round of trivia gives our team the chance to test their knowledge around typical trivia categories or sometimes even Passion-specific knowledge. Teams or individuals compete against each other in several rounds and whoever answers the most questions correctly wins.
Rating: 4 stars.
Show and Tell ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Organising a “Show and Tell” for your team is a beautiful way to encourage personal connection and trust among team members. The idea is that everyone who is part of the show and tell session brings an item to the call that means a lot to them or that has a funny, interesting or meaningful story to it. Everyone shows their item and shares the story behind it. More often than not, amazing conversations come up during these sessions.
Rating: 4 stars.
Mafia ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Again, an all-time favourite here. We have to admit, Mafia is much more fun in person which is why we often play it during our PassionLIVEs (offsites). If you don’t know Mafia (also known as “Werewolf”, you can find a quick summary of how it works here).
As you can see, an in-person game is really the best possible set-up for a really good Mafia game - it gives you the opportunity to read the body language of people, see the expressions on their faces and just enjoy the feeling of community during the game. Nevertheless, there is a way to play Mafia virtually as well. The narrator assigns the roles via private message on zoom and will also receive the decisions from the mafia, doctor, and detective via private message on zoom. In fact, there is a whole community playing Mafia on zoom called “Daily Mafia”.
There are also online versions of the game available, e.g. this one.
Rating: 5 stars.
Bonus: Birthday Celebrations
We love birthdays (who doesn’t?)!
We celebrate birthdays in our team by singing happy birthday to the Passioneer we’re celebrating in our happy Friday call. The fun part about it is that we all sing in our own language. That can easily end up in 30 people singing in 7 different languages at the same time and is always a lot of fun.
In addition to that, we complete a little “task” and share a message on slack to celebrate together. Some of our favorites so far include:
- Share a picture of the place you would send the birthday child for their birthday
- Paint a picture of your birthday cake for the birthday child
- If you had 100 Dollars to spend on a gift, what would you get? (Post a picture)
- You’re invited to the birthday party, what food or drink would you bring?
- If the birthday child wasn’t [...] at Passion, what would they be in a parallel reality? (Post a picture)
Recommendations
If you want to try some of these games with your team, we can recommend Doozy as a platform for that (www.doozy.live). We love to use the platform for our happy Friday calls and for quizzes.
For longer activities, we can recommend Teambuilding (www.teambuilding.org). Especially the murder mystery is a lot of fun!
To join our next quiz or cooking class, check out our open positions.
