Office Party Games
For whoever has been handed the Christmas do, the away day or a Friday afternoon, with the planning bits that actually decide whether it goes well.
Start with the constraints, not the games
Every decision about office party games is downstream of four numbers: how many people, how long you have, how many are remote, and how many actively do not want to do this. Choose the game first and you will spend the session fighting one of those numbers.
- Group size. Up to about eight is one game round a table. Twenty is several small games in parallel, or one thing on a screen. Sixty is a quiz, and only a quiz.
- Time. An hour in the calendar is about forty five usable minutes. Plan for that number, not the one in the invite.
- Remote split. Any format where the remote people are an audience will fail. If a third of the team is on a screen, everything has to work on a phone.
- Willingness. Assume a quarter of the room would rather be anywhere else, and design them a dignified exit.
A run sheet for forty five minutes
This shape holds up for a mixed team of roughly six to twenty.
- 0 to 5. Arrivals. Put the link in the chat. Explain nothing yet.
- 5 to 12. One warm-up that needs no setup. Ten quiz questions on a screen is plenty.
- 12 to 32. The main event: one twenty minute game, run in parallel groups if the room is large.
- 32 to 40. Standings and prizes. Keep it short and slightly ridiculous.
- 40 to 45. Overrun, because there is always overrun.
The two mistakes worth naming. Skipping the warm-up means the first ten minutes of the main game becomes the warm-up while nobody knows the rules. And having no hard stop means people start drifting off during the finale, which is a worse ending than finishing early.
The people who hate games
They are not being difficult. Organised fun is genuinely unpleasant if you are shy, new, tired, or the only person in the room who does not know the in-jokes yet.
What works is making participation gradual rather than binary. A game people can watch for two minutes and then join beats a game that needs everybody signed up at minute zero. Small teams beat individuals, because someone can contribute quietly without performing. And say out loud at the start that sitting out is completely fine, at which point almost nobody sits out.
Mixed remote and in-person
The reliable pattern is one shared screen plus everybody's own phone. Put the thing the room looks at on the projector, and give each person their own input on the device in their hand. Remote people then get the same shared screen over the call and the same phone in their hand, which makes them players rather than spectators.
What does not work: a physical board game with a webcam pointed at it, and anything where the people in the room can hear a hint the people on the call cannot. If in doubt, test it with one remote colleague the day before. It takes four minutes and saves the session.
Alcohol-free by default
A social built around drinking excludes the people who do not drink, which is a larger share of most teams than it used to be, and it excludes whoever is driving home. Make the game the reason to be there and the drinks incidental. The practical test is simple: if the game only makes sense after two drinks, the game is not the entertainment, the drinks are.
Prizes
Small and silly beats valuable. A large prize makes people compete properly, and competing properly is how a party game becomes an argument in the kitchen. A trophy that sits on somebody's desk for a quarter works far better than a voucher, and handing out several small awards means more of the room gets named for something. Worst place is a category. So is the most catastrophic single decision.
Ideas that have nothing to do with this website
No single game solves a party, and a page like this should not pretend otherwise. These are the formats that keep working.
- Quiz rounds. Still the most reliable option for a large group. Ten questions a round, one picture round, and at least one round written about the company.
- Two truths and a lie. Excellent for teams with new joiners. Weak for teams who have sat together for six years and know everything already.
- Desk-item charades. Act out a job title or a type of meeting using only what is on a desk. Free, fast, and reliably funniest from the most reluctant participant.
- The photo round. Collect baby photos or first-day photos in advance and match them to people. Needs a week of lead time and one person chasing.
- Bingo on the all-hands. Only works if your all-hands is genuinely full of jargon, which it almost certainly is.
- A walk. Underrated. If the team is exhausted, forty minutes outside beats any game you could organise.
Where Shareholder Party fits
It fits the twenty minute main event slot for up to six players per table, and it handles the mixed remote case well, because everybody joins the same room from a link or a six letter code and plays on their own device.
What it is: a board game about being an employee in a British office. You roll a die and move round a floorplan, collecting Shareholder Value from paydays and losing it to deductions, a strategic restructure, and HMRC noticing an underpayment from 2019. A P0 incident at 03:40 costs you nothing at all in money, only the next turn. Fifteen SV buys the sign-off on one objective from THE BOARD, and the first person to deliver the whole roadmap wins. Enough stress in a row and the burnout meter signs you off, which costs a turn as well. Two one-way shortcuts, the fire escape and the goods lift, cut across the board but skip the Board tiles entirely, which is the decision the game keeps making you take.
Every round ends in a minigame of twelve to thirty four seconds that everybody plays at once, which is the part that makes the room shout: PRINTER JAM, THE STAND-UP, INBOX ZERO, SPREADSHEET SPRINT, P0 INCIDENT, BUZZWORD BINGO, MICROMANAGED and COFFEE RUN. Nothing in it is crude and nothing targets a colleague. The joke is always management, process and the shareholders. How it works has the full rules if you want to read them before Friday.
Running it for a bigger group
- Split into tables of four to six and run several rooms at the same time, then compare final Shareholder Value between tables.
- Put the leaderboard on the projector between rounds so the room has something to look at.
- Fill gaps with temps rather than making a table of three wait for latecomers.
- Use the quick preset, two objectives over eight rounds, if the slot is tight or you want two games instead of one.
- If one table is short, open rooms lists public games with a free chair, so nobody has to sit and watch.
A warm-up that needs no setup at all
The four daily puzzles are the same for everybody in the world each day and reset at midnight UTC, which makes them a ready-made shared round: JARGON is a five-letter business word in six tries, VALUATION is higher or lower on company market caps, THE AUDIT sorts sixteen office line items into four groups, and PAY BANDS puts six jobs in order of what they really pay. Everyone plays on their phone, results are shareable as emoji, and past days are there if you want to try one before you use it on the team.
Questions
How big can one table be?
Six per room. For a larger party, run several rooms in parallel and compare the final standings between tables, which also keeps each game to twenty minutes rather than an hour.
How long should I budget?
Twenty minutes for a standard game, or about ten on the quick preset. With a warm-up and prizes at the end, a whole session comfortably fits in forty five minutes.
Does it work with remote and in-office people together?
Yes, and this is the case it suits best. Everyone joins the same room from a link or a six letter code and plays on their own phone or laptop, so nobody in the room has an advantage over anybody on the call.
Is there anything unsuitable for a work event?
No swearing, nothing crude, and no mechanic that asks players to judge or rank each other. The satire is aimed at management, process and shareholders. The one judgement call is timing: it is a game about a bad employer, so read the room if the week has been difficult.
Do people need accounts or a download?
Neither. It opens in a browser and guests play with just a display name, which matters when you are trying to get twenty people started in five minutes.
Can we put it on a projector?
Yes. The usual setup is the shared screen for the standings and the round results, with each player using their own phone. The layout works on both.
What if someone has to leave halfway through?
The game keeps going. Their turns auto-play so the round never stalls, and if they come back, reopening the link returns them to the same seat.
Set it up now
Create a room, send the code to the team channel and let people trickle in: start a game. For the warm-up, put the four daily puzzles on the screen and give the room five minutes to argue about what a Head of Enablement is paid.
For an ordinary week rather than a party there is online workplace games, and if the worry is whether any of this opens on a managed laptop, online browser games answers that.