Company party and team day games for large groups (20 to 100 people)
Games for summer parties, team days and company events with a big crowd, from mixing departments to team challenges, a whole-company quiz and a running order.
A company event isn’t a dinner party with more people. There might be sixty of you, from six departments, some of whom have only ever met as names in an email thread. It might be outdoors in June, in a hired hall, or in a field next to a hotel where someone has booked a “team day”. And unlike a night out with friends, nobody chose to be there with these particular people.
That’s exactly why games help. A good game gives strangers something to do together that isn’t small talk about the weather or the reorganisation. A bad one makes forty adults stand in a circle wishing they were somewhere else.
This post is about the big, all-year events: summer parties, away days, kick-offs, company anniversaries. If you’re planning the Christmas do, we’ve covered office Christmas party games separately, and short games for meetings are in quick team games for work.
Plan around the group, not the game
Before picking anything, answer five questions. They rule out most bad ideas on their own.
- How many people, and how many at once? Thirty people in one room and a hundred spread across a garden need different formats.
- Where is it? Indoors with tables, outdoors on grass, or a bit of both. Check whether there’s a microphone, a screen and decent Wi-Fi or mobile signal.
- Who’s coming? Different ages, different fitness levels, people who don’t drink, people whose first language isn’t the one you’re playing in. Some events include partners and children too.
- How much time do the games get? Most company events need about an hour of structured play, at most. The rest is food and conversation.
- What’s it for? Mixing teams who never talk, celebrating a good year, or just a nice afternoon. “Mixing people” means you control who’s in which team. “A nice afternoon” means you mostly don’t.
If you only remember one thing: everything should be optional, and nothing should depend on being fit, loud or good at English.
Splitting into teams
Almost every game for a big group works better in teams of five to eight. Teams also take the pressure off individuals: nobody is the person who got it wrong, the table got it wrong.
How you form them matters more than people think. If you let people choose, they’ll sit with their own department and nothing changes. Some ways to mix them without it feeling forced:
- Colours on the name badge. Print badges with a coloured dot, spread across departments in advance. Teams are the colours.
- Birthday months. Everyone born in January and February is a team, and so on. Random, quick, and it starts a conversation.
- Draw from a hat. Old-fashioned and fair. Senior people get drawn like everyone else.
- Seat by table number. If there’s a sit-down meal, set the seating plan with mixing in mind and let each table be a team for the afternoon.
Give each team two minutes to choose a name. The names alone are usually worth it.
Icebreakers that work for fifty people
The classic icebreaker, where everyone says their name and a fun fact, takes forever with fifty people and nobody remembers any of it. These work better because everyone does them at the same time.
- Human bingo. Hand out a bingo card with boxes like “has worked here less than three months”, “speaks three languages”, “has run a marathon”, “has never been to the head office”. People walk around and find someone for each box, one name per person. First full line wins. Write the boxes from things you know about your company, so they’re surprising but never personal.
- Line up in silence. The whole group lines up by birthday (day and month), with no talking. Then check the order out loud. It takes five minutes, works in any language, and ends with people laughing.
- Find your other half. Give everyone half of a famous pair on a card: salt and pepper, Batman and Robin, fish and chips. They have to find their partner and learn one thing about them. Good for pairing people from different teams on purpose.
- Four corners. Call out a question with four answers, such as “Best holiday: beach, city, mountains or staying at home?”, and people walk to the matching corner of the room. Two or three rounds and everyone has spoken to someone new.
For more questions you can use, see our list of icebreaker questions.
Team challenges you can run with almost nothing
These are the backbone of a good team day. Each one takes ten to fifteen minutes, needs cheap materials, and has a clear winner. Run them at the same time for every team, or set them up as stations (more on that below).
- The marshmallow tower. Each team gets 20 pieces of dry spaghetti, a metre of tape, a metre of string and one marshmallow. The tallest freestanding tower with the marshmallow on top after 15 minutes wins. Teams that plan for ten minutes and build for five usually lose to the ones who build early and fix things as they go, which is worth pointing out afterwards.
- The egg drop. Same idea with an egg, a few sheets of paper, straws and tape. Drop from a chair, then a table. Messy, loud and very popular. Have kitchen roll ready.
- Photo scavenger hunt. Give each team a list of twenty photos to take within 30 minutes: the whole team in a lift, something older than the company, a stranger giving a thumbs up, a human pyramid (optional, at least two people’s feet on the ground). Teams send photos to the organiser, and the best ones go on the screen later.
- Paper planes. Each team builds three planes and flies them once. Longest distance wins, with a bonus prize for the best-looking failure.
- Blind drawing. One person describes a simple picture, the rest of the team draws it without seeing it. Compare the drawings with the original at the end.
Keep the rules short and printed on each team’s table. Explaining the egg drop to sixty people over the noise of a garden party is a losing battle.
Outdoor and lawn games
If you’re outside and the weather is on your side, put a few lawn games out and let people drift between them. They don’t need a host, which frees you up.
- Mölkky, the Finnish throwing game with numbered wooden pins, is the one to buy if you buy one. Anyone can play, the rules fit on a card, and scoring exactly fifty is harder than it sounds.
- Boules or pétanque needs flat ground and nothing else.
- Cornhole (beanbag toss) is good for people who want something to do with one hand while holding a drink in the other.
- Giant versions of tabletop games, like a big stacking tower or giant four in a row, always draw a crowd.
Avoid races and anything that needs running unless the event is specifically a sports day. Someone in a suit, someone pregnant and someone with a bad knee should all be able to join in.
A quiz for the whole company
A quiz is the one format that reliably works with a hundred people at once. Everyone plays in teams, and the noise of tables arguing over an answer is the best sound an organiser can hear.
A good company quiz has four or five short rounds and lasts about 40 minutes:
- General knowledge, nothing too hard.
- The company round. What year did we open the second office? How many coffees did the kitchen machine make last year? Guess the colleague from their desk photo. Check the answers with someone who knows, and keep it light.
- A picture round on paper, which teams work on during the other rounds.
- A number round, where the closest answer wins. This is the great leveller, because nobody has to know anything exactly.
For the number round, a phone game saves you the marking. Closest Wins and Price Check both take up to 20 players, so with a big crowd, give each team one phone and let the table agree on a guess before it goes in. Twenty teams of five is a hundred people in one game, and the scores appear straight away. Put the room code on the screen and you’re set up in a minute.
Have one host with a microphone, one person collecting and marking answer sheets, and a clear scoreboard. Read out the scores after every round, starting from the bottom.
Phone games for smaller groups during the breaks
Between the planned parts of the day there are always loose groups of six or eight standing around with coffee. That’s when a phone game works best, because people can join and leave as they like.
- Off the List has a mode where the room splits into 2 or 3 random teams, and each team has its own chat for arguing over answers. Two teams need at least four players, three teams at least six. It’s a good one for mixing, because the teams are drawn for you.
- Card Clash takes 2 to 12 players and is easy to pick up mid-conversation.
- Wavelength is calmer and suits a group that wants to talk rather than shout. Up to 12 players.
Nobody needs to install anything: one person opens a room on play.guezzer.com and the others join from their phone’s browser.
The station format for team days
For an away day or a summer afternoon with a lot of people, stations are the easiest structure to run.
Set up four to six stations around the venue, each with one activity and one volunteer to run it: the marshmallow tower, a quiz table, a lawn game, a phone game on a tablet, a photo challenge. Teams rotate every 12 minutes when a whistle or bell goes. Each station awards points, and the volunteer writes them on the team’s score card.
What makes it work:
- Mix physical and seated stations, so there’s always something for everyone.
- Keep the rotation strict. If one station overruns, the whole plan slips.
- Add a break after the third station. Water, shade, toilets.
- Brief your volunteers the day before, with printed rules for their station.
With six stations and six teams, everyone does everything in about 75 minutes, including the break.
A running order you can borrow
For a summer party that starts at 2pm and ends around 7pm:
- 2:00 Arrival, food and drinks, lawn games out for whoever wants them.
- 2:45 A short welcome. Then human bingo or the silent line-up, ten minutes.
- 3:00 Teams formed by badge colour. Team names.
- 3:10 Stations or team challenges, about 75 minutes with a break.
- 4:30 Free time, more food, phone games for whoever wants them.
- 5:15 The company quiz, 40 minutes.
- 6:00 Prizes, a thank you from someone senior (short), and the photo scavenger hunt highlights on the screen.
- 6:15 Back to the food and the music.
What goes wrong, and how to fix it
- Only a few people join in. Don’t push. Start with a game that people can do from where they’re standing, like four corners, and the rest follow once it looks fun.
- One team is far ahead. Make the last round worth double. It keeps everyone interested until the end.
- Departments compete too seriously. This is why you mix the teams. If sales versus engineering is a long-running rivalry, don’t put it on the scoreboard.
- It rains. Have an indoor plan, and keep stations that only work outdoors to one or two.
- The senior leadership team stays at one table. Draw them into teams like everyone else, ideally different ones. People enjoy watching the managing director lose at paper planes, and it does more for the culture than the speech.
- It runs long. Cut a round. Nobody will ever miss the round you cut.
Keep the prizes small
A trophy that the winning team keeps on their desk for a year, a box of chocolates per team member, the right to choose next year’s theme. Expensive prizes make people take it too seriously and make the losers feel worse. The best ones are a little bit silly.
The real prize is the moment on Monday morning when someone from finance stops by the marketing desk to talk about the egg drop. That’s what a company event is for, and an hour of good games is the quickest way to get there.
