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Ask HN: Team fun event ideas during WFH?

216 points| pseudobry | 5 years ago

Can y'all share any team fun event ideas that have worked well for you during the WFH/pandemic period? My folks miss the natural in-person interactions that occur in the office, and we could use some time together to decompress. But, how do we do that remotely? Maybe you long-time remote teams are already experts at this? Is there an "awesome-remote-team-fun-events" GitHub repo?

Any ideas are welcome, but I'm particular interested in events with $0-$100 per person budget and work with team size of 5-20 people. Thanks.

Edit: This is something we'd do during work hours.

265 comments

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noarchy|5 years ago

Related note: do it during work hours, if possible. Not all of us want to be expected to take an evening to devote to work events. Even if I genuinely like my co-workers, there are times that I want to set aside where I don't have to think about work.

abcdjdjd|5 years ago

>Related note: do it during work hours, if possible.

No, not just IF POSSIBLE, either do them during work hours or don't do them at all. If a company can't make time during work hours to throw an event they are planning, then don't expect your workers to make time for the event after work either.

evanlivingston|5 years ago

This can't be stressed enough. Work outings are still work, and all of a sudden an employer has monopolized my time. Are work events _really_ optional? If I _never_ show up to them?

squidbot|5 years ago

My team is fully remote and distributed among time zones, making it impossible to have an event during "working hours" for everyone. So we all just agree on an acceptable time. We think it's important to socialize as it helps engender trust, so we take the hit as it were. We do try to make it fair by moving the time around so it hits various people's off hours.

xwdv|5 years ago

If possible? ONLY do it during work hours.

I don’t work to make friends with co-workers and hang out after hours. I’m there to put my skills to use, get paid for it, and fuck off to live my own life. Asking me to come to an event and participate for free is bullshit, especially an online event! If it hurts my reputation, whatever? I’m still getting paid and have no desire to get promoted to upper management.

zucked|5 years ago

Work "fun" events that happen outside of work hours are totally bogus.

leetcrew|5 years ago

there are arguments for/against. it's nice that a work event during normal work hours doesn't cut into my free time, but it does cut into the block of time that I've already set aside to, you know, get my actual work done. I generally don't attend optional events scheduled during work hours unless I think attending will directly contribute to the work I am responsible for. "virtual happy hour" doesn't meet that criteria. on the other hand, I might hang out in a zoom call after hours if I don't have evening plans already.

corytheboyd|5 years ago

I too strongly agree with this

laurent92|5 years ago

I used to offer via ferratas or paragliding on worktime, but then the employees would leave at 5 (none of them have children) and no-one stayed for beers.

If you do that, then at least be good at go-kart, you’re paid for it.

At least it clarified the situation: They don’t expect work to be fun. I stopped organizing events. If you want work to be boring, then this is how to make work boring.

It makes me a bit sad. But at least I’m sure I don’t care if I lose them.

I hope to build a better team after moving (which is in the plans), but I’m clearly lacking the talent to build a dynamic team. One of them told me his preferred series was The Office. Now I know my role. Maybe I should incarnate the Mickael Scott role, have a separate office, and be so much a caricature of the boss that they’d have to laugh.

But Mickael Scott was the only one at the airport when the girl left.

codezero|5 years ago

A few of the things we've done:

- virtual murder mystery (two people on the team wrote it all up, it was intense, but I think you could buy a good package)

- drawing apps online we use https://skribbl.io but the ads are tedious

- we did a scavenger hunt for household items on different themes (we did a thanksgiving one) - this is easy to adapt to a lot and a lot of fun to see what folks have around their house - fills a lot of curiosity and makes folks feel more connected, also folks get creative in their finds - which adds to the fun.

- I like the other suggestions of a lego set / cooking - I have a friend whose company sent cooking ingredients and folks all cooked together - another that had two or three people "compete" like a cooking show with the rest of the team judging - good times.

- literally just get a cheesy icebreaker book - for once these things really do help get folks primed and engaged.

- Play Among Us

- Give folks a gift card and have them bring what they buy to a show and tell

Really looking forward to other folks' ideas.

vga805|5 years ago

+1 for Among Us, had a lot of fun with my tam playing this.

codezero|5 years ago

Some other things: bought the team Minecraft and hosted a server for happy hours. It was fun but fizzled out. I think that’s ok and folks should get used to rotating ideas.

We did a happy hour using Drizzly - if your team drinks it’s a nice service and you’re basically ordering from convenience stores so other drinks and snacks are available.

Play some kind of challenge game and keep a leader board. Puzzles or trivia, or some game the whole team likes and can speed run or some other high score task.

laurent92|5 years ago

> Really looking forward to other folks' ideas.

No, I want to work for you! (I’m kidding, I can’t leave the company I founded)

PS: Is there something to do with a Lego set? Being able to keep it at the end would be nice to remember the company’s present.

Eduard|5 years ago

Do you have recommendations for icebreaker books?

jscud|5 years ago

We recently had a fun remote event: a painting class.

A local company shipped supplies to each person (canvas, brushes, paints) and held a video session with a teacher who walked us through how to paint a particular picture step by step. Accessible for beginners, many of us had never painted before.

tharkun__|5 years ago

This is the kind of thing that really depends on the team you have. If you tried this with me on the team... well good luck. I might hate you for the rest of my life. They actually tried this at a previous job with a "pottery class".

Of course your marketing team might really love this. Or the guy on one of the other teams here that actually was on part-time so he could do all his paintings and prepare for his exhibition.

cjohnson318|5 years ago

That's great! It's really hard to create a safe space for people to do art.

phemartin|5 years ago

Loved the idea of having a remote manual activity to spark joy.

tj-teej|5 years ago

What was the company?

chapium|5 years ago

Give everyone $100 and tell them to take a half day at work.

avgDev|5 years ago

Anyone who has a family and hobbies liked this comment.

schwartzworld|5 years ago

Underrated comment.

Personally Zoom "socializing" doesn't work for me. I'd rather stick a needle in my eye than sit around and watch my co-workers pretend to have fun. We do a weekly hangout and occasionally meetings will devolve into social time but group video chats feel like meetings, not fun.

maerF0x0|5 years ago

And there's only one rule. No work during the half day off.

11235813213455|5 years ago

getting outside is the important part, no special need for extra money (more than salary), say no to (over-)consumerism!

brundolf|5 years ago

I think it's hard to have meaningful interactions over video chat among groups with more than, say, four people. Inevitably one or two parties do all the talking at a given moment, and everyone else just listens

Something we've started doing at my company is monday-morning "random coffee". Everyone gets paired off to video chat with a random person for 20 minutes at the start of the day. It's been a great way to have some non-work conversation with the people I do interact with, and have any exchange at all with those I never interact with

josephorjoe|5 years ago

> Everyone gets paired off to video chat with a random person for 20 minutes at the start of the day.

i would quit this job sooooooo fast

random, enforced, early morning socializing is so very much not my scene

airtonix|5 years ago

lol nope. not even once.

jcomo|5 years ago

Co-founder of Offsyte here (https://www.offsyte.co). We created Offsyte as a solution for this problem (not just virtual, but finding fun team events in general). You can find & book events directly on the platform - I'm even seeing some of the vendors we work with in this thread!

You can find escape rooms, cooking & cocktail classes, magic shows and more. Many events have a delivery component so that there's no pre-work required for the team.

Feedback welcome! You can also email me at jonathan [at] offsyte.co

masterofsome|5 years ago

I really like this. Where I work, my boss just picks a place on Airbnb near the beach, and we stay there for the weekend. Will recommend this to my boss.

joshschreuder|5 years ago

I’ve done a few Jackbox Party Pack games sessions over last year’s lockdown, they are good fun and there’s normally at least one game per pack that everyone can be good at, without necessarily being the funniest or most creative.

It works quite well over screen share due to being time based rounds with not a huge reliance on reaction times / audio

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jackbox_Party_Pack

pridkett|5 years ago

This is what I’ve done with my team of about 20 people about once every six weeks. I put them on my iPad and then share that audio and video via a USB cable and QuickTime recorder to the team. It works well enough - particularly if you have family safe mode, but tends to struggle for engagement beyond 8 people (also limits games at that size).

We’ve also created a few team specific decks for Cards Against Humanity and merged them with Cards Against Containers and Cards Against DevOps. We then use Pyx-Reloaded on a VPS to play the game. Modulo the bugs in Pyx-Reloaded it’s fun, but suffers problems when people drop out.

Skrbbl has been good - we have to use personal devices to play it (same with JackBox) and it quickly becomes apparent who has PiHole on their home network and who does not.

Buttons840|5 years ago

Jackbox seems alone in this niche, and their style is a bit crude for some. I think some of my family or co-workers would be offended by some of their games.

IvyMike|5 years ago

Everybody gets sent a lego set and (for those who can) a drink, and you spend a couple of hours building and talking.

mytailorisrich|5 years ago

That's a creative idea. I'm writing it down!

Where I work the Xmas party was obviously cancelled because of Covid so I was expecting an online event paid-for or gift vouchers, but they said that in the end we got zilch and they decided to give away the budget to charity because "that felt like the right thing to do"... Well, for moral and engagement no it wasn't...

tschwimmer|5 years ago

My team did this recently and it was a lot of fun!

Kluny|5 years ago

Rad idea! I was given an IKEA-branded lego set for Christmas and it was good for hours of entertainment during the winter break.

dolmen|5 years ago

Which LEGO set?

I'm wondering which LEGO set would be appropriate for an adult non-AFOL public...

CiuB|5 years ago

I was randomly chosen to come up with an event for my team, a couple of weeks ago. Our team had recently doubled in size, and I have never met some of them face to face. So I decided to come up with a 1 1/2 slot, where a team member could present something about themselves. Be it a hobby, interest, holiday, interesting story, game you played e.t.c. people were given the option to join and watch only, or present. a About a 1/3 of my team volunteered. So we had around 10 presentations. I personally presented my beer brewing hobby. At the end people sent me there favourite (I like to call them lightning talks) and who ever got the most won some money. It was great. Found out stuff I never knew about people. And the winner was a guy who did wood carving in his spare time, particularly Daenerys from Game of Thrones. People who were from other countries talked about there homes and some about photography, there was a guy who talked about his heavy metal interest, another archery and the others were interesting to.

summm|5 years ago

Was it optional? I find it incredibly invasive to force someone to present something for the sake of presenting. At best people choose something boring and bland as an excusem And similarly invasive to force people to sit through such presentations.

kaliara|5 years ago

We've also done this on our team (we labeled them lightning talks), and people really enjoyed them. It also helps to get to know one another on a slightly deeper, non-work way without crossing boundaries.

Recommended!

wikibob|5 years ago

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boomeranked|5 years ago

We run "trips" to Paris, if you want to bring your team to the city of lights! Live footage from Paris, cheese and wine delivered, the whole nine yards!

https://www.woyago.com/

MaxHoppersGhost|5 years ago

This is very well done, nice job. My team is back in the office but wish we did this during quarantine.

maerF0x0|5 years ago

Mandatory fun is rarely fun. Let people self organize. Allow them to take the cash alternatively.

Also do everything in your power not to label people who do not want to participate. The worst is when a company has mandatory fun, and then kiss your promotion goodbye for not "being a team player" by attending an event that doesnt interest you.

gknoy|5 years ago

I don't know what the per-person budget is, but our team had a really enjoyable time doing one of those group painting activities. They shipped us supplies, and we all were in a Zoom meeting together. I notice the resulting painting on my mantle about once or twice a week, and it always makes me smile with thoughts about how fun that was, and how much I enjoy the people with whom I work.

adamjb|5 years ago

Our office of 13ish does the quiz in the newspaper [0] as a team at 9:30 two days a week. One person shares their screen and reads the questions and then we collectively decide on our answer. Lasts about 10 minutes and it's a fun way to start the day and highlight everyone's various strengths.

[0] Today's quiz (we got 16/30, pathetic!) https://www.theage.com.au/national/target-time-and-superquiz...

jot|5 years ago

Live Video Escape Room maybe? https://livevideoescaperooms.com/

Or for a different way to think about it try what Podia did for a team dinner: https://kindops.com/remote-dinners

At The Skiff Coworking community we enjoy weekly drinks here: https://getmibo.com/ It’s so much more natural an experience than Zoom.

almost|5 years ago

Thanks for posting that! https://LiveVideoEscapeRooms.com is my site, part of my attempt to help the customers for my startup (A SaaS product for Escape Rooms) weather the pandemic. Online Escape Rooms are really a lot of fun, it's so cool to see all the creativity in the industry being channeled into crazy online games (many of theme featuring live video links to the escape rooms, but some also hosted completely online).

I've since also pivoted my startup and created a new product (https://TelescapeLive.com/) for escape rooms moving to online!

ljoshua|5 years ago

Shameless (semi-)self plug: my wife loves putting together DIY escape rooms, and given the current situation she recently made one that can be done completely virtually with little prep:

https://www.thegamegal.com/diy-escape-room-kit-alien-threat/

Five "rooms" (or in other words, five people or small groups) that all coordinate via a video call and each have a mini-site and individual puzzles to solve that build up to the main solution. I think she's pretty awesome and therefore the game is pretty awesome, but I'm a bit biased. :)

pt3530|5 years ago

We have been playing Among Us over zoom. It has been good for team building because we do whole game while talking to each other. The meetings to figure out who is the imposter are fun because the imposter needs to lie to the team to convince them they are not the imposter.

Some simple rules: - everyone's phone is muted so the imposter is not revealed by the startup sound - if anyone dies, they can't reveal it until the body is found

After everyone does the first install/game it becomes easy to do a game every time we finish a meeting 10 minutes early.

Hansenq|5 years ago

This is a tough problem! Every quarter I have budget in the same range as yours that I try to fill up. Some good things that have worked for me outside of the normal board games/order takeout are:

- Team Japanese cooking class via Kenji Y--we really enjoyed this one! The recipes are simple and super tasty and he's a great educational host. https://kenjiskitchen.com/

- Mixology class hosted by Avital--I have one scheduled for next month and I'm pretty excited! https://avitaltours.com/

If I have leftover budget I use that to buy a nice gift/box of chocolates/macarons/etc and send it out at the end of the quarter, but I agree, it's tough to plan bonding events while remote. Any little bit of planning an event helps though!

themakermark|5 years ago

Once a month we pick a fun recipe that can be made in less than 1 hour and we all cook it together (over zoom) and then eat. We have done sushi, sourdough, ramen, pizza etc.

This works well as it feels like a shared experience of learning together, in this case learning to cook new foods. Many of us continue to make those same foods once we learned.

To make it easier on everybody, we ship any tools or ingredients we can and always do it during overlapping work hours.

Siyfion|5 years ago

We had a real DJ come and start off each day in spectacular fashion over video link recently. The team LOVED it, he took requests and it got everyone awake and excited for the day ahead. Plus, it drove a great team discussion on our musical tastes! (We had https://djgraffiti.com/ - Can't recommend him enough!)

djgraffiti|5 years ago

Thanks so much for the shout out. Happy to bring you all closer as a team. If you can make it by early to the set tomorrow I'll have Paradise Circus cued up for you!

nathanwallace|5 years ago

Agree! We've just been doing a simple Spotify playlist before all hands, shared over Zoom. Works great with everyone just quietly hanging out together for a while and sets the mood for the meeting. Most recent was a 1992 theme for our internal launch celebration of https://steampipe.io (a tool to query cloud resources using SQL).

enriquto|5 years ago

> Can y'all share any team fun event ideas that have worked well

Sure. Give everybody a raise and quit forcing stupid "team" shit.

MaxHoppersGhost|5 years ago

Money is great but when WFH more human interaction really is needed. Especially for those that are younger without a family.

myowz|5 years ago

An Oculus Quest 2 costs 300 + tax -- extremely memorable way to have an event in these times. And acts as a collaboration device and an amazing gift going forward.

alfiedotwtf|5 years ago

Reading through all the comments here, I was meh towards most, but yours was the only one I wowed at.

Sure, people like different things, but a device (gift) and then spending time together (co-op games etc) is an awesome idea

krg|5 years ago

Maybe not what you had in mind, but we (TechEmpower, creators of the web framework benchmarks) built a system to randomly shuffle employees among short daily social calls. The calls are not mandatory, but we usually have enough people join for a fun chat. We've found it to be a fun, low-pressure way to keep in touch. It's free to use, if you want to try it for your organization.

We only collect the data we need for the service, and don't use it for any other purpose.

https://watercooler.monster/

josephmosby|5 years ago

Every Thursday at 5 EST we have company "pub trivia" over Kahoot. Folks take turns as the host and coming up with trivia questions, and as we've grown we have a healthy set of inter-team rivalries going.

For ad hoc events we've played Among Us, had a tarot card reader come read fortunes, had multiple chefs do cooking classes, and had a few musicians do amateur concerts over Zoom.

Agree with others that work hours is best. We have standardized on around 5 ET for most things, which is not too late for the East Coasties and not too early for the West Coasties.

tharkun__|5 years ago

You said during working hours and then you say 5 ET. That's after working hours. Especially for me, as I start before 9...

jdlyga|5 years ago

Anything that involves free stuff. Cooking class with free ingredients, a painting class with free paint, a wine tasting with free wine. Just anything but a regular old zoom "happy hour".

ianmabie|5 years ago

I have a good friend who runs http://barnonetrivia.com - they have professional hosts who lead ~hour long live zoom trivia games. Questions are creative and original. Can't recommend enough - very fun!

jedgardyson|5 years ago

Wanted to come here to plug this: https://teams.startplaying.games/. Participated in a hosted game with them a week ago and really really enjoyed it. Think that D&D and other role-playing options like it are a great way for teams to stay connected during the pandemic in a lower stakes type environment where everyone can express themselves in a cooperative/constructive way!

dcas|5 years ago

I think the single best thing for me are just casual video chats. Whether they‘re 1on1, the whole team or randomized chat groups like the Donut bot does, doesn‘t matter. But it‘s important that they don‘t have a work-related agenda so no one feels pressured to get some specific outcome.

jebarker|5 years ago

My team recently did a virtual escape room. Was well organized and encouraged communication and collaboration within the team. We used this company: https://www.puzzlebreak.us

LinuxBender|5 years ago

I can share my idea, but I have not been able to convince anyone to do this. I would find a MMORPG or similar type game that has concepts of groups, teams, guilds, etc.. and then find challenges, quests, tasks that require teamwork or that can have multiple teams competing against one another. The game should have a chat system that aligns with those team structures. There are probably free-to-play games that carry some of these concepts.

I agree with others that this should be done during work hours. I do not show up to team or company events that are on my time.

archi42|5 years ago

As someone who spent quite some time with MMORPGs, I think a huge problem is the neccessary time investment to get a lot of the "more interesting stuff" going. In other words: A MMORPG usually is equivalent to the epic pen&paper campaign that can take your group years to finish. You don't want to do that as a fun event. What you want is the quick "one shot" equivalent, a kind of MMORPG which you can "finish" in an evening.

It's just a comparison. Obviously you're not going to do a pen&paper RPG with a group of 20 to 500 people (we did 20 once, it was... uhm... interesting?).

bkanber|5 years ago

I always have fun with gather.town. Pictionary in particular is a blast.

politelemon|5 years ago

Sadly it seems to block other browsers

>To ensure a high quality experience, join Gather on Chrome!

INTPenis|5 years ago

My co-workers have continued their whiskey tastings over MS Teams. The guy organizing them mails out little sample bottles to each participant. Participants pay to cover the costs.

AdrianB1|5 years ago

There are a couple of things that we used to do before the pandemic and can be done or adapted for these times. 1. Kart racing. It is an outdoor activity and quite safe if you bring your own helmet and gloves. It requires decent temperatures (at least 20 degrees Celsius), so it depends on your location. 2. Virtual bar or restaurant. We used to go out to some places, we can order foods and drinks while videoconferencing on Teams. It works best with some app that accepts sub-groups in a conference because this is also the dynamic at the restaurants - even if we went in a group of 10-15 around a large table, the discussions were broken in groups of 3-5 based on reach and loudness. The app should not mute the others, just reduce the volume so that there is the atmosphere of having 10 people around the table but being able to talk to 2-3 at the same time.

If you do #2 well, you can do weekly a different theme: 'virtual <your preferred pizza restaurant>', 'virtual <preferred pub>' etc, so you just order from one place every time as you would do if you were physically there. Having dinner and drinks with people helps unwind, doing it virtual helps with (not) driving afterwards after a couple of beers.

akrolsmir|5 years ago

I've been building a list of fun board games to play online at https://boredgames.gg!

One of the games I built as well, https://oneword.games, is very well suited to work events; it's a casual, cooperative game that supports any number of players, so fits neatly into team happy hours or "offsites"

Wingman4l7|5 years ago

My team of ~10 had a pretty good time with a D&D one-shot session using https://app.roll20.net/ . Bonus was that enough of us enjoyed it that we could pick up where we left off and hold successive events. Caveat -- the DM (and at least a couple more people) were familiar with the website, and were able to help newbies set up fresh characters.

wilwade|5 years ago

Cost: $0 Time: ~1 hour Location: Zoom Requires: Someone to act as host

Here's something we recently tried that worked fairly well: Story Time. The goal was to share short humorous stories. Exaggerations were encouraged. And topics suggested. To help I (acting as the host) started it off with a story about a car and picking up "new" clothing at 70 mph. Opening up to others for other stories, but specifically encouraging stories about cars or clothing (to help prime the pump).

People tended to thread story topics on their own for the most part, but if things quieted down, I would add in another story, likely shifting the topic around some.

A few stories fell flat, but they are short and for the most part it worked really well. It also helped with one of the parts of "Zoom Happy Hour" that I hate: not knowing who is supposed to be talking and when to join in.

It does require a level of comfort with the team, but at the same time it allowed an enjoyable time for those who just wanted to lurk. It also didn't appear to be limited to those who lean extroverted as some happy hours can even in real life.

kmarc|5 years ago

Oh but that's what I do on our daily in the morning. Isn't that's why it's called a "stand-up"?

Speaking seriously, we have a Mo-Wed-Fri 3PM 'virtual coffee break'. The team of ~15 is invited, but it's optional, and free mic; you can talk about anything. It's fun, not always the same people, not the same topics.

victormustar|5 years ago

This is not particularly original but I built a little social game for work teams a while ago (before the pandemic): https://live.jubiwee.com/ - We enjoy using it with my team from time to time. The goal is to bring back social interaction even if we all work from home (for what it worth).

jakub_g|5 years ago

We sometimes play fun multiplayer games online (+zoom for talking)

1) https://garticphone.com/en

2) Among Us (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.innersloth...)

kroltan|5 years ago

Absolutely second on Gartic Phone, it is brilliant.

It is a drawing game, but it has no scoring, so it is very welcoming for all skill levels, including zero!

Among Us also has a desktop version if you prefer, but it is paid. (cheap though, 10BRL, dunno dollars) (you probably know, but to anyone who reads)

secondbreakfast|5 years ago

My friends launched Marco[0] last year for teams do fun stuff virtually. Was at first skeptical of doing something like a gin tasting on Zoom, but all of the events I've done are really fun. They vet the events, manage delivering food and booze for you, etc.

[0]: https://www.marcoexperiences.com

suman_siva|5 years ago

Yeah! Suman from Marco here - check us out!

Aliabid94|5 years ago

Trivia nights are a fun bonding exercise and easy to do over zoom. We've had fun making our own online jeopardy boards.

esotericn|5 years ago

In the UK, it is legal to exercise with one other person. So one is able to go for a walk.

Despite this, virtually no companies I know of are encouraging this real, physical, safe interaction that has a huge potential for building team bonds.

It's been a year so far, and we could well be doing this for years.

I think that outdoor team events are a reasonable way forward.

jefe_|5 years ago

For a holiday get together a teammate created a trivia game using this tool: https://ahaslides.com/

It was surprisingly fun. You could join just using a link (no account needed), and scorekeeping was well done. They incorporated media, so for some questions a song would play, for others there would be images, word scrambles. My favorite question type, they would play a song, and you had to choose, from a list of emoji, all of the emoji that applied to that song. Unsure how much of this is default functionality of the tool, and how much was my teammates creativity, but it definitely worked very well and as well received coupled with a zoom call. We had about 20 people of all ages playing.

cojo|5 years ago

We are still in the early stages of our launch / rolling this out, but this problem is one of the main things our team is hoping to help solve at https://playpad.com - WebRTC chat combined with fun games / activities designed to be played with the group.

Currently we have a cooperative "pub trivia" game, a jigsaw puzzle suite, and a "co-opetition" word scramble game where you are working together but competing to be the best of the group as well.

If you do give it a try, I'd love to answer any questions & hear any feedback you have at cory [at] playpad.com - we are still in early alpha and iterating rapidly / trying out new ideas directly based on the feedback we receive!

iso1631|5 years ago

For starters, something that happens during office hours.

graphcalculator|5 years ago

Our team uses https://backyard.co - it's free, has tons of really fun party games, and comes with built-in video chat. My favorites with large groups are Fake Artist, Word Scramble and Codewords

nicolashahn|5 years ago

Our team played Among Us during our last team social. I think I'm going to suggest Golf With Your Friends next, I played it with a different group of people and it was a ton of fun, very silly especially if you turn on collisions, jumping, spin, etc.

SecureToaster|5 years ago

We've done: - Bake pizza (and chat) - Played a selection of mini games, trivia, apps, what ever people found. pictionary works well on zoom for instances. - Quiz. Each team had to prepare 10 points worth of questions, each team = 1 round. A good compere makes or breaks it. Inc bonus rounds like "2 minutes to find the oldest food item in your cupboard" - paid for www.theeventscompany.co.uk for 1 evening. Not idea how much they charged us.

Also using zooms break out rooms to split us up into small groups of 4-6 so you can have a more personal chat really. Do that for 10m. Then shuffle the rooms. In a 20 room only a few people will really talk.

nabousteit|5 years ago

Think about including physical items by organizing crafting events. Everyone starts with the same supplies or has to find them in their homes. Creating the same thing that then is unique to each person is quite something and you can SEE creativity (and everyone feels accomplished.)

Your group size suggestion is great. You want to avoid the Ringelmann effect "in which big groups can become less productive because people tend to feel less committed to an outcome."

And you're challenged by "Social Cooling"(Dutch technologist Tijmen Schep says that a big-data society can chill our personal relationships because we’re being watched all the time.)

Jorslu|5 years ago

Our team plays https://skribbl.io/ weekly during our "Coffee Break Hour"

It's a fun way to interact, laugh, and find out who says they can't draw but can actually draw. We play with about 8 people, sometimes others join in to just watch or we take turns. Honestly, skribbl has been the closest thing to in-person interactions we have had in a long time. I created the weekly 1-hour coffee break meeting on our calendars @ 3pm local time. Usually water-cooler talk, sometimes video games for the laughs.

masonhipp|5 years ago

I just recently launched https://slideswithfriends.com for exactly this purpose — it's a slide-based game builder with a bunch games made for team building. Imagine Jackbox-meets-Powerpoint but designed for companies.

We have a lot of trivia games, some Quiplash-style games, photo sharing games, and other interaction slides that make for some really interesting and fun event options. And everything we have is customizable so you can add content specific to your company if you want.

Plus there's a sound board :)

mo2lina|5 years ago

Appears there's quite a few players emerging in this space, some with overlapping vendors :-), so I'll go ahead & throw my venture in the ring https://www.evee.com

We've found the most engagement by organizing larger team "mini-festival" where you pre-book multiple experiences and let your teammates pick & choose which events they want to attend. https://demo.evee.com

mccolin|5 years ago

Beer & Cheese Tasting!

We had a company event from City Brew Tours (based out of NYC, I believe, but we're in Philadelphia) where we were shipped boxes of cheese, crackers, and beers (or ciders or sodas at the employee's selection to support alternatives) and during the event were given a tasting experience over Zoom.

It was excellently done, gave team members a chance to socialize about non-work things, and we learned something, too.

https://www.citybrewtours.com/

bradhilton|5 years ago

Not a super creative, fun "event" per-se, but we have weekly virtual team lunches on Monday where the company orders everyone doordash and we hop on a zoom call to eat and chat. YMMV

Moody_10001|5 years ago

Video games would be cool too. Factorio and Counter-Strike or whatever else the kids are playing these days. Call into a shared Zoom if there's no built-in voice chat. We enjoyed it.

HashiCorpEvents|5 years ago

We recently held a TV Writers Room workshop with these guys: https://andthenwriters.com/ We chose the show 'New Girl', split into teams, and then went into Zoom breakout rooms to work on the basis of an episode (they lead each room). Then we got back together, each team pitched their episode, and we held a vote for the winning team. It was a lot of fun and really brought the team togither!

grok22|5 years ago

We did this once as a farewell to a departing team member -- share-a-drink-over-zoom; worked quite well too. Mostly people chatting and reminiscing and discussing the current customer-from-hell -- it was an unexpectedly good way to bond. Maybe it worked well because the focus was on one person. But zoom can be a pain for separate one-on-one conversations in a group -- but there are now newer online conference systems that seem to facilitate that (haven't used any of those though).

barfly4489|5 years ago

I've played Bar None Trivia (www.barnonetrivia.com) a bunch of times with my team -- it's a blast.

Hosts were great and led us through 4 four rounds of creative trivia (including out-of-the-box questions, picture round, music round).

We were split into teams in breakout rooms so we actually got to converse and connect with people on our 5-6 person team. Also spent time in the main room as an entire group.

Pricing is $15-20/person depending on time of game. We play at least once a month, couldn't recommend more!

breck|5 years ago

- One team member organized an event where everyone contributed a song they'd take to an island, we made a playlist, then played them one by one in Teamflow, and each person explained why they chose that song.

- Another time we did a game where each team member sent a story to the organizer, names were removed, then everyone tried to match the story to the person.

- There's always guest speakers to present on a relevant topic. Easier now that they don't have to travel.

ydnaclementine|5 years ago

If you want to play something async, http://gamesbyemail.com/ has a bunch of different board games that you can play by email and will email you when it's your turn. We've had most success with Risk and Chinese Checkers, which both support up to 6 people. Games can last a few weeks. There's also a bunch of 2 player games (Connect 4, Chess, etc).

woodrowbarlow|5 years ago

last year i set up a game of scythe in my kitchen with an overhead camera -- i could hit a button on my phone to snap a pic and upload to my vps. played this way with a group of friends over the course of a few days and it worked pretty well. some things were tricky -- cards that players receive that are supposed to be "private", for instance, but most of the game worked face-up.

gagzilla|5 years ago

You can also host an event for online volunteering- eg. mapping projects. Examples- https://www.missingmaps.org/ and https://www.hotosm.org/

Most of these would show a leaderboard of whoever has made most contributions (within your event/subgroup) and you can turn it into a game.

jfdi|5 years ago

I use https://increment.me and toss some suggestions out and ask my team to send in theirs. Been great so far. Things that have come back for ex - calls with specific leaders in the company w/no agenda, just give people part of a day off, do some mid day gaming, etc. Thematically most wanted company fun inside working hours.

Only disclaimer, Increment’s my product.

vinnymac|5 years ago

The other day my team played https://codenames.game to decompress, it was a lot of fun. If you have a large group, just break it up into multiple sessions. Can go crazy and do a tournament if you'd like.

I find a lot of these remote games have a large impact on productivity in the day. They are a great way to start conversations and get to know each other.

ximus|5 years ago

video games

- lots of diversity, choice (helps finding something that best fits everyone)

- lots of positive emotions (designed by people whose jobs it is to make you have fun). tremendously effective at creating shared moments of joy.

- lots of cooperative games (team building yaye!)

- loose engagement: easy to hop in and out without much fuss, play as much as you want

- easy to repeat: so many games to choose from, some games have no ending

- won't necessarily fit anyone (but what does)

recommendations?

- Portal

- Among Us

I'm sure fellow HNers will have better suggestions

marineverse|5 years ago

Shameless plug, but it's free :-)

Activity: Split into groups of 5 and go sailing. Relaxing or you can organise a race around island #5 ( start and finish next to the big boat ).

Search for "Pancake Sailor" on Steam - it's free and has both Windows and Mac version.

Greg

sanketn|5 years ago

Might have exactly the thing you are looking for :)

We have built social/banter filled games to play right within Slack called Bored.

The games are not the typical team games - they involve accusing and deceiving people, roasting your colleagues and the like.

If that sounds like your thing and you are on Slack, you can install it from https://bored.social/

kosmischemusik|5 years ago

Hey, we found it on Product Hunt the other day and it's been super fun playing it. We loved the roasting game.

What other games do you have lined up?

slezakattack|5 years ago

I've seen "The Go Game"[1] work really well amongst teams within my company. I am in no way affiliated with this company, just heard good things. They have a variety of activities like trivia, puzzles, and some others.

[1] https://www.thegogame.com/team-building-games

abridgett|5 years ago

One of the favourite events we did was "two truths and a lie". Each person makes three statements about themselves (as personal or impersonal as they like) and others ask questions and then vote. We did a little leaderboard. It was great fun and we got to know each other much better. I'll also never trust my colleagues to tell the truth ever again :-)

g051051|5 years ago

> My folks miss the natural in-person interactions that occur in the office, and we could use some time together to decompress.

Ugh. The last thing I want to do after working all day is "hang out" with co-workers. If you're going to force me to participate, it better be during work hours, and you can't expect people to make up the lost "work" time.

Biancaerica|5 years ago

Hello! We at Serein Inc have being doing alot of fun activities with groups of all sizes during this pandemic. Murder mysteries,Treasure Hunts (themed), Pop Quiz, Mafia all done virtually. We've received excellent feedback and even once had employees ask (well beg!) their HR if we could run activities for them every week! You write to us hello@serein.in

mopeot13|5 years ago

I've been organizing our internal activities however I did hire Social Scavengers Inc to help out with one part of our virtual holiday party and it was a blast.

What we've been doing is giving our employees a stipend to spend on dinner and/or drinks and everyone joins in in an activity via Zoom- anything from trivia to true or false show and tell.

I hope this helps! Good luck!

kurttheviking|5 years ago

Terrariums (e.g. https://www.etsy.com/listing/880201016)

We all received a kit in the mail and on a Friday afternoon, everyone was guided by an indoor gardening expert. It was a calm, pleasant, ~2 hour exercise and I got a fresh plant for my desk out of it.

suman_siva|5 years ago

We're building a company around this called Marco - we'd love for you to check us out! We think we're the best way to bring your people together and have options ranging from Kombucha Making to Private Comedy Shows [0]

[0] https://www.marcoexperiences.com/

mopeot13|5 years ago

I've been organizing our offices events which have gone well but I did hire Social Scavengers Inc. to help with an event for our Holiday party and it was a blast.

What we've been doing with the events I organize is giving employees a stipend to spend on drinks and/or dinner and then we all participate in an activity on Zoom.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

7263255|5 years ago

It's hard to have a cocktail party on Zoom, but there is a new "breakout rooms" feature that we used at our Holiday party to set up a bunch of different topic rooms (and some random ones) where people could pop in and out of. It was better than 50 people in a room where only one can really talk at a time.

kosmischemusik|5 years ago

Spotted a game for Slack on Product Hunt the other day. We tried it out in our company workspace and it was quite fun. We loved the roasting game the most :D. Especially since our boss was playing and she was quite the sport.

https://bored.social/

bighitbiker3|5 years ago

Shameless plug, but this is exactly what we do at Mystery. We have a curated catalog and the ability to distribute supplies to your team.

The activities I’ve helped vet are all super fun and engaging and our customers have loved them as well.

https://trymystery.com

m-p-3|5 years ago

This https://meet.airconsole.com/

or if someone has a copy of Jackbox Party Pack that's also another game that's fun and easily streamable, without costing a lot of money as you only need one license to play as a group.

decafninja|5 years ago

Gaming is always an option, but that assumes your entire team consists of gamers or at least willing to try.

hellotoby|5 years ago

As a team we play a game of Geoguessr (https://www.geoguessr.com/) on Friday afternoons. It's fun to have some friendly rivalry and banter and de-compress together after a week of work.

koolk3ychain|5 years ago

As someone who used to like team happy hours / events when we had offices - team "events" via zoom are weird and awkward. I spend so much of my time at home working, that the last thing I want to do in my free time is pretend to want to talk to my co-workers.

moistbar|5 years ago

Jackbox games like Patently Stupid or Fibbage are great since only one person has to buy the game in order for everyone to play. Just do a screen share of the main screen and have everyone connect using their phones. My friends and I do it frequently and it works great.

mbohorquez|5 years ago

I can't recommend these enough. The game packs can be bought in Steam, and there are games for everyone (trivia, drawing, puzzles). The trivia games even have a "Disable US centric questions" so everyone on the globally distributed team can enjoy them.

I started remotely last year and playing these kind of games have been a great way to get to know the team in a more informal setting.

makhedge|5 years ago

There are a bunch of fun events available at www.teambuilding.ryptic.com. They're a bay area escape room company that has expanded into a Virtual Paint nights, Game nights and virtual escape rooms!

Also have heard good things about the free options available at rume or zombies.io.

clankyclanker|5 years ago

Bob Ross videos are on YouTube. Most computers have paint or krita or something. Take a half hour to do a screen share paint-along meeting and show off your paintings in the last minute or two. Then set it as your background for two weeks until you do another one.

davidhowlett|5 years ago

I personally bought all my team members a beer delivered to their houses. One guy didn't like beer and got whiskey instead. On Friday at 4pm we all had a casual chat about non work topics and drank together. That seemed to go down well.

fovc|5 years ago

We use watercoolertrivia.com and it's great for having something to talk about other than work/covid. We use their weekly program ($1/user/mo iirc), but they also host one off events

Disclosure: I previously worked with one of the founders

MarcScott|5 years ago

- I set up a CS:GO server, and that took us through a few weeks for those that were interested.

- We have open games of Among Us which are also great.

- We also did an online Virtual Escape Room within my small team, which was great fun.

ejgill8|5 years ago

We have Team daily "stand-ups" for staying in touch daily but the best "during work team fun events" are our Friday group and team virtual happy hours during work hours!

tobiasbischoff|5 years ago

Among US is a ton of fun. But make sure everyone plays a couple of rounds for themselfs to get familiar with the game.

If everyone is into Battle Royales, Warzone or Fortnite can be fun as well.

shubik22|5 years ago

Another shameless plug :)

I recently left my job at Google to focus on building a trivia platform (https://www.trivvy.co/). We offer both async trivia leagues and live trivia games over Zoom with professional hosts. We're currently beta testing our live games (for free!), so if anyone wants to do a fun live event (anywhere from 60-90 minutes), shoot me an email (sam at trivvy dot co).

Also if you're interested in trying out a multi-week season with one game/week played whenever players are free, feel free to reach out as well :)

cowllin|5 years ago

Async team building as weekly ritual is often a better investment than a one time event, one of the many reasons I built watercoolertrivia.com :)

pessimizer|5 years ago

boardgamearena.com, esp. 6 nimmt, Oh Hell!, Incan Gold, and No Thanks seat more than six, are very easy to explain, are very fun, and are brisk. Turn the Tide only seats six, but meets the other points.

Short tournaments could be fun. The site allows people to be spectators to games they're not participating in, and if everyone is connected by voice chat it could be a nice shared experience.

SanjayThomas|5 years ago

The Houseparty app has a decent variety of games that you could play together as a team. Our team had a lot of fun playing pictionary on it!

umbula|5 years ago

Live action "Where's Wally?". Turn camera off. Hide. Turn camera on. Works better with two plus people in the same location.

Bashmaistora|5 years ago

Online board games on a video call is a fun option.

screye|5 years ago

We play a lot of Codenames. It is a lot of fun.

TexanFeller|5 years ago

I appreciate the effort companies make trying to team build over Zoom, and some events have been genuinely fun, but for me it falls flat in terms of feeling connected socially. You just simply can’t have the same type of social interactions over video, that’s one reason companies often fly in remote workers every year or two. It’s almost worse seeing people over video because of a sort of uncanny valley effect and taunting you with the fact that you can only see them “through the prison window”. I very much look forward to my vaccine taking hold.

m_a_g|5 years ago

Tabletop Simulator was a lifesaver for us. We play it every week and I can't recommend it enough.

gigatexal|5 years ago

Two teams of ten or at least more than 5 and play Among Us. We do as a team and it’s awesome!

leereeves|5 years ago

Among Us was my first thought, because it's a good social game, but is it a good team game? Encouraging dishonesty and distrust doesn't sound like a good team-building exercise.

Perhaps it depends on how much the team already trusts one another.

summm|5 years ago

you can't really talk during the rounds, so not much bonding potential

crazybones|5 years ago

A small sites I created that is super easy to set up fun event for even 15+ people. https://www.virtualmorale.com/

Have games like Telestrations and Draw and Guess that are very fun for teams!

aritraghosh007|5 years ago

Airbnb Remote Experience have worked decently well for us.

ipiz0618|5 years ago

We played Among Us a while ago and it was really fun.

swlkr|5 years ago

Zoom trivia is quite fun

giantg2|5 years ago

We played kahoot once

cpursley|5 years ago

What about a bonus or some extra time off rather than a team event?

rcpt|5 years ago

Play Diplomacy

collyw|5 years ago

Breaking the rules and meeting up in person.

vga805|5 years ago

Among Us!

Nailgun|5 years ago

The best team events are no events.

Buttons840|5 years ago

Not always, but it does take an awfully good event to beat having no event at all.