10 Virtual Team Meeting Games to Reconnect your Remote Team in 2020

COVID-19 may have taken a lot away from us, but it definitely didn’t take away drab meetings. As our affinity for Zoom withers by the day, we’re left wondering how to make virtual meetings more fun and more bonding between our co-workers. Enter, virtual team meeting games.

Fun activities in meetings are certainly nothing new, but we’re here to show you how to adapt team building games to the remote environment.

Below you’ll find 10 of the best virtual team meeting games, how to make them and how using them will bring the comradery back to work.

In this post, we’ll cover…

• Why Use Virtual Team Meeting Games?
• 4 Benefits of Virtual Team Meeting Games
• When to Use Virtual Team Meeting Games
• Top 10 Virtual Team Meeting Games
• Game #1: Staff Soundbite
• Game #2: Jeopardy
• Game #3: Picture Zoom
• Game #4: Mini Balderdash
• Game #5: Build a Storyline
• Game #6: Household Movie
• Game #7: Most Likely to…
• Game #8: Pointless
• Game #9: Sheet Hot Masterpiece
• Game #10: Drawful 2
• The Best Tool for Creating Virtual Team Meeting Games

Why Use Virtual Team Meeting Games?

Let us paint the digital landscape, here.

A study from UpWork found that 73% of companies in 2028 will be at least partly remote.

Another study from GetAbstract found that 43% of U.S workers want an increase in remote work after experiencing it during the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s almost half of the country’s workforce that now wants to work at least partially from home.

All the numbers really point to one thing: more and more online meetings in the future.

Now, we’ll let you decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but we also have to remind you that it’s an inevitable thing. Virtual team meeting games are your way to keep the connection between your employees in an ever-fragmenting work environment.

4 Benefits of Virtual Team Meeting Games

1. Team bonding — Putting co-workers together to engage in virtual team meeting games is as good as any team building activity you can do in-person. These games not only form bonds within teams, but also the connection of your workforce as a whole. Naturally, this can have amazing benefits for company-wide unity long after the meeting has finished.
2. Help break the ice — Maybe your team is one that has only just formed, or maybe your meetings are pretty infrequent. If your team members are getting to know each other for the first time, or for the first time in a long time, virtual team meeting games are fantastic for breaking the ice. They let new members get to know each other on a human level and help to reconnect co-workers who used to see each other every day. Looking for great virtual ice breakers to connect your team? We’ve got a bunch of them here.
3. Improved memory of meetings — Things that are different and fun are memorable, right? Do you remember each of your 30 zoom calls with your boss this month, or do you remember the one time that her dog was making a pillow fort in the background? The same thing goes for games in meetings. A team member who performs an activity that’s engaging and different from the norm is more likely to remember the details of your meeting afterwards.
4. Psychologically, for them — The most important benefit of virtual team meeting games is one of the mind. A Buffer survey revealed that 20% of remote workers name loneliness as the biggest struggle when working from home, the joint top response with collaboration and communication issues. Psychologically speaking, co-operative games can do wonders for your workers’ state of mind and give them a feeling of togetherness that transcends the importance of work.

When to Use Virtual Team Meeting Games

It’s totally understandable that you don’t want to waste your meeting time — we’re not disputing that. But, you have to remember that this meeting is often the only time in the day that your employees will properly talk with each other.

With that in mind, we advise using one virtual team meeting game in every meeting. Most of the time, games don’t go beyond 5 minutes, and the benefits they bring far outweigh any time you may consider “wasted”.

But when to use them in a meeting? There are a few schools of thought on this…

• At the beginning — These kinds of games are traditionally used to break the ice and get brains in a creative, open state before the meeting.
• In the middle — A game to break up the heavy business flow of a meeting will usually be most welcome by the team.
• At the end — A recap game works great for checking understanding and ensuring everyone’s on the same page before they go back to their remote work.

Check out our article and survey (with 2,000+ surveyees) about remote work and online meeting behaviours.

Top 10 Virtual Team Meeting Games

So here it is, our list of 10 virtual team meeting games that will bring the joy back to your online meetings.

Note that many of these games use AhaSlides, which is free software designed to connect users through interactive presentation, polling, and in this case, gaming.

Game #1: Staff Soundbite

Staff Soundbite is a chance to hear those office sounds you never thought you’d miss, but have been strangely yearning for ever since you started working from home.

Before the activity begins, ask your staff for a few audio impressions of different staff members. If they’ve been working together for a long time, they’ve almost definitely picked up on some of the little innocent traits that their co-workers have.

Play them out during the session and get participants to vote on which co-worker is being impersonated. This virtual team meeting game is a hilarious way to remind everyone that none of the team spirit has been lost since the move online.

How to make it

1. Ask for 1 or 2-sentence impressions of different staff members. Keep it innocent and clean!
2. Put all of those soundbites into type answer quiz slides on AhaSlides and ask ‘who’s this?’ in the heading.
3. Add the correct answer along with any other accepted answers you think your team might propose.
4. Give them a time limit and ensure that faster answers get more points.

Need help making a sound quiz on AhaSlides? We’ve got a quick tutorial for that.

Game #2: Jeopardy

The game show of game shows came to the small screen in 2020. Jeopardy has always been a captivating bit of TV trivia, but now it’s one of the best and free virtual team meeting games to kick off the online proceedings.

Jeopardy Labs is a completely free and intuitive service that lets you create your own Jeopardy game online. Simply name the categories, write out the questions and call out your team to answer.

Jeopardy Labs has a bunch of question templates you can use, but it’s best if you can write categories and questions that have something to do with work. You can also bring this game out at the end of a meeting to test what was just discussed.

How to make it

1. Head to Jeopardy Labs and either find or create (create is better) a Jeopardy table.
2. Make 5 or more categories.
3. Make 5 or more questions for each category. Make sure they get progressively harder down the table.
4. Put your participants into teams and share your screen.
5. Follow the usual Jeopardy format (check out this great article for online Jeopardy)

Game #3: Picture Zoom

Got a stack of office photos you never thought you’d look at again? Well, rummage through your phone’s photo library, gather them all, and give Picture Zoom a go.

In this one, you present your team with a super zoomed-in image and ask them to guess what the full image is. It’s best to do this with images that have a connection between your employees, like ones from staff parties or ones of office equipment.

Picture Zoom is great for reminding your co-workers that you are still a team with a wonderful shared history, even if it’s based on that ancient office printer that always prints stuff in green.

How to make it

1. Gather a handful of images that connect your co-workers.
2. Create a type answer quiz slide on AhaSlides and add an image.
3. When the option to crop the image appears, zoom in on a part of the image and click save.
4. Write what the correct answer is, with a few other accepted answers as well.
5. Set a time limit and choose whether to grant faster answerers more points.
6. In the quiz leaderboard slide that follows your type answer slide, set the background image as the full-sized image.

Game #4: Mini Balderdash

If you’ve ever played Balderdash, you might remember the ‘weird words’ category. This one gave participants a strange, but totally real word in the English language, and asked them to guess the meaning.

In the remote setting, this is perfect for a bit of light-hearted banter that also gets the creative juices flowing. Your team may not (in fact, probably won’t) know what your word means, but the creative and hilarious ideas that come from asking them are certainly worth a few minutes of your meeting time.

Simply ask them what the word means, let your team see everyone’s answer, then get all of them to vote twice: once for which answer is most likely to be right, then for which is the most funny.

How to make it

1. Find a list of weird words and use AhaSlides to make an open-ended slide for each.
2. Choose to hide the answers and reveal them when everyone’s guess is in.
3. After each of these slides, add two multiple choice slides, one asking which answer is right and one asking which one is funniest.
4. Give 2 points for anyone who got the right answer, 1 point to each person who voted the right answer when listed, and 1 point to each person who got a funny answer vote.

Game #5: Build a Storyline

Don’t let a global pandemic quash that bizarre, creative spirit in your team. Build a Storyline works perfectly to keep that artistic, weird energy of the workplace alive.

Start by suggesting the beginning sentence of a story. One by one, your team will add their own short additions before passing the role onto the next person. By the end, you’ll have a full story that’s imaginative and hilarious.

This is a virtual team meeting game that requires very little effort and runs behind the scene throughout the meeting. If you’ve got a smaller team, you can loop back around and get everyone to submit another sentence.

How to make it

1. Create an open-ended slide on AhaSlides and put the title as the beginning to your story.
2. Add the ‘name’ box under ‘additional fields’ so you can keep track of who’s answered
3. Add the ‘team’ box and replace the text with ‘who’s next?’, so that each writer can write the name of the next.
4. Make sure the results are unhidden and presented in a grid, so the writers can see the story in a line before they add their part.
5. Tell your team to put something on their head during the meeting while they’re writing their part. That way, you can rightly excuse anyone gazing down at their phone and laughing.

Game #6: Household Movie

Always thought that the way you stacked your stationery always looked a little bit like Jack and Rose floating on a Titanic door? Well, yeah, that’s totally mad, but in Household Movie, it’s also a winning entry!

This is one of the best virtual team meeting games for testing the artistic eye of your staff. It challenges them to find items around their house and put them together in a way that recreates a scene of a movie.

For this, you can either let them choose the movie or give them one from the IMDb top 100. Give them 10 minutes, and once they’re done, get them to present them one by one and collect everyone’s votes on whose is their favourite.

How to make it

1. Assign movies to each of your team members or allow free range (as long as they have a picture of the real scene, too).
2. Give them 10 minutes to find whatever they can around their house that can recreate a famous scene from that movie.
3. While they’re doing this, create a multiple choice slide on AhaSlides with the names of the movie titles.
4. Choose the layout of the results between a bar, donut or pie chart.
5. Click ‘allow picking more than one option’ so that participants can name their top 3 recreations.
6. Hide the results until they’re all in and reveal them at the end.

Game #7: Most Likely to…

If you never got one of those fake awards in high school for being the person with the highest probability of doing something that ended up being a woeful misjudgment of your character, now’s your chance!

You know your team better than anyone. You know who’s most likely to get arrested on a booze-filled holiday or most likely to submit an unwitting audience to an off-key rendition of Knowing Me, Knowing You.

In terms of virtual team meeting games with the best effort to hilarity ratio, Most Likely to… knocks them out the park. Simply name some ‘most likely’ scenarios, list out your participants’ names and get them to vote on who’s most likely.

How to make it

1. Make a bunch of multiple choice slides on AhaSlides with ‘most likely to…’ as the title.
2. Choose to ‘add a longer description’ and type in the rest of the ‘most likely’ scenario on each slide.
3. Write the names of the participants in the ‘options’ box.
4. Untick the ‘this question has correct answer(s)’ box.
5. Present the results in a bar chart.
6. Choose to hide the results and reveal them at the end.

Game #8: Pointless

If you’re unaware of the British game show Pointless, let me fill you in. It’s all based around the idea that more obscure answers to broad questions get more points, which is something you can recreate with AhaSlides.

In Pointless, the virtual team meeting games edition, you pose a question to your group and get them to put forward 3 answers. The answer or answers that are mentioned the least bring in the points.

For example, asking for ‘countries starting with B’ might bring you a bunch of Brazils and Belgiums, but it’s the Benins and Bruneis that will bring home the bacon.

How to make it

1. Create a word cloud slide with Ahaslides and put the broad question as the title.
2. Up the ‘entires per participant’ to 3 (or anything more than 1).
3. Put a time limit on answering each question.
4. Hide the results and reveal them at the end.
5. The most mentioned answer will loom largest in the cloud and the least mentioned (the one that gets the points) will be the smallest.

Game #9: Sheet Hot Masterpiece

Workplace artists, rejoice! It’s your chance to create stunning artwork using nothing but the free tools on your computer. Except, by ‘stunning artwork’, we mean crudely drawn pixel replicas of beautiful masterpieces.

Sheet Hot Masterpiece uses Google Sheets to recreate classic pieces of art with blocks of colour. The results are, naturally, way off from the originals, but they’re always absolutely hilarious.

Of all our virtual team meeting games, this one probably requires the most effort on your part. You have to engage in some conditional formatting on Google Sheets and create a colour pixel map for each piece of artwork you want your team to recreate. Still, it’s totally worth it in our opinion.

Thanks to teambuilding.com for this idea!

How to make it

1. Create a Google Sheet.
2. Press CTRL + A to select all cells.
3. Drag the lines of the cells to make them all square.
4. Click on Format and then Conditional Formatting (with all cells still selected).
5. Under ‘Format rules’ select ‘Text is exactly’ and input the value of 1.
6. Under ‘Formatting style’ choose the ‘fill colour’ and the ‘text colour’ as a colour from the artwork being recreated.
7. Repeat this process with all the other colours of the artwork (entering 2, 3, 4, etc. as the value for each new colour).
8. Add a colour key on the left so that participants know what number values evoke what colours.
9. Repeat the entire process for a few different artworks (make sure the artworks are simple so that this doesn’t take forever).
10. Insert an image of each artwork into each sheet that you’re making, so that your participants have a reference to draw from.
11. Make a simple multiple choice slide on AhaSlides so that everyone can vote for their favourite 3 recreations.

Game #10: Drawful 2

We’ve mentioned the wonders of Drawful 2 before, but if you’re new to the software, it’s the best out there for some seriously out-the-box doodling.

Drawful 2 challenges players to draw pretty far-out concepts using nothing but their phone, a finger and two colours. Then, players see each of the drawings in turn and guess what they’re supposed to be.

Naturally, the quality of the pictures isn’t the highest, but the results are truly hysterical. It’s a great ice breaker for sure, but it’s also a virtual team meeting game that your staff will be begging to play again and again.

How to make it

1. Purchase and download Drawful 2 (it’s cheap!)
2. Open it up, start a new game and share your screen.
3. Invite your team to join on their phones via a room code.
4. The rest is explained on the game. Have fun!

The Best Tool for Creating Virtual Team Meeting Games

If you’re looking for something to help you make memorable virtual team meeting games that both entertain and educate, you might expect to look at Jeopardy Labs and Drawful 2 (but probably not Google Sheets!)

AhaSlides may mainly be used for interactive presentations, quizzes and polling, but it’s a very versatile platform that can be a killer addition to your games roster.

We’ve got quite a few examples here, but our 100,000+ users are always finding new, fun ways to use our software for their own games. We’re sure you can add a few to this list!

Try out AhaSlides for free by clicking the button below. Happy gaming!

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