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8 online office games to build strong remote or hybrid teams
No more forced fun at your happy hours. Here are 8 online office games your team will actually want to play.
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Back before Playstations and iPhones, one thing parents could rely on to keep their kids entertained (and out of their hair) for at least a few hours was a game of Monopoly. It’s a great tactic, because if anyone’s ever told you they’ve played a game of Monopoly in under an hour, they’re lying. According to the official rules, a “short game” of Monopoly lasts 60-90 minutes*.
While games may sound like a luxury for businesses, causal downtime actually helps people de-stress, build relationships, and develop a range of skills. Strong social connections are a key part of building a great company culture and keeping people motivated, engaged, and working well together. This is especially important for teams that can’t interact in person and miss casual face-to-face interactions.
That’s why it’s crucial to find ways to bring your people together to bond, have fun, and not talk about work.
But while Monopoly has captivated generations of kids and families, filling their evenings and weekends, it’s not the best option for an office game. Though it would be nice to spend an entire workday buying up Park Place and the Boardwalk, your deadlines and bosses may not agree.
That means you need to find activities that fit into your workday, but that people still actually want to participate in.
To help you, we’ve put together a list of eight online office games to build stronger teams. Whether you’ve got an hour for a remote team-building session or are looking for a quick opener game for your weekly meeting, here are some suggestions your team will actually enjoy.
Get everyone involved, whether you’re working or playing.
Switchboard’s multiplayer experience lets everyone participate, from running a design review to playing happy hour trivia games.
Learn more
An overview of our favorite games
Here’s a quick look at how long these games take to play, how much they cost, and how many people can play.
8 best online office games
Monopoly has brought families together (while also temporarily tearing them apart) since it was patented in 1935, with hundreds of millions of sets sold around the world and billions of people playing the game since then.
Despite being one of the most popular board games in the world, though, it’s not the right fit for teams looking for interactive online activities. But there are plenty of other games you can use to engage your team, bring them closer together, and build company culture. We’ve organized our list by duration and whether you can play together in real time or async:
- Takes 5-15 minutes to play
- Takes 15-30 minutes to play
- Takes an hour to play
- Can be played async
So whether you only have time for a ten-minute meeting warmer or want to plan an ongoing async team competition, here are eight engaging online office games your people will love.
Office games you can play in 5-15 minutes
Planning a quick activity at the start of a call helps you make team meetings more engaging. But everyone is tired of typical icebreaker questions or games like two truths and a lie, so switch things up with these games that you can play in less than 15 minutes.
skribbl.io
Price: Free
Capacity: Up to 20 players
Remember Pictionary? skribble.io is a virtual version that makes for a fun and engaging icebreaker game. Players are randomly assigned a word to draw, and the rest of the team guesses what their masterpiece represents.
skribble.io lets you set custom drawing time limits, so if you’re trying to keep the game short, you can give players as little as 15 seconds to sketch something up. However, drawings are more detailed and the game is more fun when you allow for at least a minute.
If you’ve got a small team, say around eight people, you can definitely get a game of skribbl.io in under 15 minutes. The game supports up to 20 players, but the more people you play with, the longer the game will last, so just keep that in mind.
Instead of sharing your screen to play this game, you can create a persistent room in your Switchboard workspace to pull up the game on your web browser and display the drawings to your team. You can even set up a permanent games room on Switchboard so you always have somewhere to meet for your virtual activities and can keep all your materials in it.
Scattergories
Price: Free
Capacity: Up to 45 players
Scattergories is another classic game that’s gone digital, and it’s a great option for a quick meeting warmer. To play the original game of Scattergories, participants roll a 26-sided dice to get a number of the alphabet. They must then fill out a list of categories (e.g. cities, food, movies, etc.), all with words that start with that letter.
The Scattegories website lets you create a virtual game and invite up to 45 team members. You can choose custom categories (or automatically generate categories) as well as establish the number and length of rounds.
Even if you have a big team, you can easily play a game of Scattergories in just five minutes, making it a fun meeting opener to engage your employees and give them a quick break.
Just open up the website within your Switchboard meeting or project room and set up a quick game to get everyone engaged before your weekly team meeting or sprint planning call.
Office games you can play in 15-30 minutes
Perhaps you’ve got a long training session and want to give employees a 20-minute break, or you do biweekly team bonding exercises but don’t want to take an hour out of everyone’s day. If so, here are two activities for work from home employees or hybrid teams you can complete in 15-30 minutes.
Gartic Phone
Price: Free
Capacity: Up to 50 players
If you ever sat in a circle as a child, telling the person to your right what the person to your left just whispered in your ear, then you’re familiar with the game Telephone. Gartic Phone is the virtual version and, in fact, a combination of Telephone and Pictionary.
Each participant has to write a “quirky sentence,” which another player will subsequently draw out. The next player receives that sketch and has to write what they think it is, and so on until each sentence has made a full round of all the participants.
At the end of the game, players see how each sentence progressed and transformed, much like in a real game of Telephone. Gartic Phone also lets you set special modes like “masterpiece” with no time limits or “crowd” with 30 or more players.
Like skribbl.io and Scattergories, you can open up Gartic Phone in your designated Switchboard games room to play a round when you want to give your team a half hour or so to have fun.
Jackbox
Price: Varies depending on which games you buy. You can also choose game packs to save on various games.
Capacity: Most games support up to eight players. If you have a larger team, Jackbox has some suggestions on which games could work for you.
A favorite among groups of friends, Jackbox games also make for great virtual team-building activities that provide a fun way for your employees to get together and relax. Instead of sitting around asking about each other’s weekend at your next virtual happy hour, encourage some friendly competition with a Jackbox game. Just know that some Jackbox games can get a bit risqué, so be sure to turn on the family-friendly setting and profanity filters if you want to keep things PG.
Popular Jackbox games include:
- Quiplash: Each player writes a response to a prompt. The game pits players' answers up against each other and participants vote for their favorite.
- Fibbage: Questions consist of an unusual fact with a missing word or phrase. Players fill in the blank with a lie and then all the lies, plus the real answer, are displayed. Participants must successfully identify which answer is true.
- Drawful: Players draw out “weird and unique” prompts and other participants submit a title for each drawing. Players then must select among these made-up titles and the real prompt, and each person who selects the real prompt gets points for that round.
As with the other games we’ve listed, you can play Jackbox games within a Switchboard room. To do so, open up Jackbox.tv within a room and share your room code with players so they can join on their own devices.
Office games you can play in an hour
Nobody likes charades. Don’t force your employees to play charades over Zoom at your next virtual team-building event. Instead, here are two unique hour-long activities to connect and engage your remote workers and hybrid teams.
Woyago
Price: Prices start at $45 per person and vary depending on which activity you sign up for and how many participants you have.
Capacity: 1,000+ participants
For the best-ever virtual scavenger hunt, hire Woyago to plan your next team bonding activity. The platform organizes and hosts online team-building activities, like virtual bike rides and cooking classes, that take place in unique settings. So instead of just sitting on a video call, participants are “transported” to Paris, Barcelona, Italy, Argentina, or India.
For example, the Italian scavenger hunt tests participants’ creativity, problem-solving skills, and ability to communicate and collaborate while teaching about the country’s culture, everything from language to food. The Argentina team building event takes your employees on a trip to Buenos Aires and is packed with tango lessons, local trivia, and a virtual soccer game.
Woyago activities are unique in that they are live events run by hosts in locations around the world, so your people get to visit new locations from the comfort of their own office.
Cozy Juicy Real
Price: “Pay what you can” model with most companies paying between $40 and $70 per person.
Capacity: 10-500 participants
With a mission to “figure out what it takes to reliably create fun, deep, and connecting conversations,” Cozy Juicy Real is a board game that helps team members get to know each other better.
The game starts with “cozy” questions that are easy to answer before leading into “juicy” and “real” questions. These prompt participants to open up and share about themselves while learning things they never knew about their coworkers, helping to establish empathy, which is essential for teamwork and team cohesion.
Cozy Juicy Real is a fun game for helping remote employees and hybrid feel more connected and closer to each other. This is especially useful if you’re trying to build company culture and increase employee engagement among people who can’t always interact in person.
Office games you can play async
A great game is one that gets everyone involved and invested, like Monopoly. And while the meeting warmers we recommended are great for building remote team culture, sometimes you need an activity everyone can do on their own time, especially if your team is spread across time zones or locations.
That’s where async games can help. Here are two options that will create some friendly competition among employees.
Team member bingo
Price: Free
Capacity: Unlimited (great for large groups)
Async bingo is a creative way to bring your team closer without having to carve time out of the week for team-building exercises or get them all in the same virtual room. You can also personalize it by creating custom bingo cards that celebrate the unique traits and habits of your team. This helps employees get to know each other better on a personal level, establishing trust and helping them collaborate better.
Create a bingo card that plays on the distinctive characteristics or behaviors of your team members (without poking fun, of course). Some ideas could include things like “Sarah always cracks a joke during a call” or “Sam forgot to unmute himself again.”
If you don’t have time to make your own personalized virtual bingo cards, you can download a template with common remote work habits, like the example below relating to video conferencing. Then, offer small prizes for employees who get bingo, and generate new versions of cards to play multiple times, perhaps once per quarter.
Guess Whose
Price: Free
Capacity: Unlimited (great for large groups)
This game gets the whole team involved on their own time. To play Guess Whose, pick a category, like pets, home office, or car. Each team member submits a picture of their own, then you can share one image with your team each day, maybe on a dedicated Slack channel.
Employees keep a list of who they think each picture belongs to, winning a point for each correct answer. Then, tally up which team member has the most points at the end of each round. The great part about this game is that not only can you play it async, but you can also create endless categories, from baby pictures to hobbies, creating an ongoing competition.
Share biweekly standings in your company newsletter, and reward winners at the end of each quarter with a lunch voucher or Starbucks gift card.
Pro tip: If you want to play Guess Whose in real time, set your game up in a Switchboard room. You can use sticky notes, polls, and the chat feature to make guesses or keep score.
Or you could even just use the room to review the results of your async game and reveal which picture corresponds to each team member.
Online office games: A great way to build connected teams
It’s easy to quickly become engrossed in a game of Monopoly, and before you know it, you’ve been playing for hours and have passed Go dozens of times. Though there’s no official world record, Hasbro claims the longest game of Monopoly lasted 70 straight days.
The same isn’t always true of online team bonding games, which can feel more like forced fun than anything else. However, if you want to build a strong company culture, you do need to find ways to help your people hangout and connect together. This is especially important for distributed teams that don’t have many (or any) chances to interact in person.
Use our list of eight online office games to get your team members engaged and involved, and use virtual office software like Switchboard to host your next game of Skribbl.io, Scattergories, Gartic Phone, or Jackbox.
Switchboard is the ideal platform for work and play because it lets you create persistent rooms for games, project work, 1:1s, and more. So you can always jump into one when you want to let your team unwind, catch up, or get work done together or async. Its multiplayer experience also means all team members can get involved and work on browser-based apps, files, and documents instead of watching someone share their screen. This ensures everyone can actively participate rather than sitting back and zoning out, which helps build a more connected, engaged team.
Get everyone involved, whether you’re working or playing.
Switchboard’s multiplayer experience lets everyone participate, from running a design review to playing happy hour trivia games.
Learn more
