Happy hour games for the bar, the office or a video call
Games that fit an after-work happy hour. Easy to join with a drink in hand, fine in a noisy bar and short enough to drop when the food turns up.
Happy hour has its own rules. People turn up in waves. Someone always leaves early for a train. Half the table has a drink in one hand and a plate of chips within reach of the other. Anything with a paper scoreboard is doomed.
So the best happy hour games have a few things in common:
- You can join between rounds without anyone explaining the whole thing again.
- A round takes a few minutes, not half an hour.
- You can play with one hand.
- Nobody has to hear every word, because the bar is loud.
At the bar
Phones are your friend here. Everyone plays on their own, so nobody needs to shout across the table.
Closest Wins is basically a pub quiz where you don’t need to know anything. The question has a number for an answer, everyone guesses, and the closest one takes the points. It handles up to 20 players, so latecomers just join the next round.
Higher or Lower is quicker still. Which artist has more monthly listeners on Spotify? Higher or lower, three lives, done. It’s for 2 to 8 players, and it’s perfect for the bit where half the group has gone to the bar.
Price Check works too: guess what a real product costs from its photo, brand and reviews. Somebody always guesses something wildly expensive, and that becomes the joke for the rest of the night.
One honest caveat: Song Battles is a great game, but the songs play as short previews, so save it for somewhere you can actually hear them.
Bar classics that need nothing
- Never have I ever. Everyone takes turns saying something they’ve never done, and anyone who has done it owns up. Keep it clean if your boss is at the table.
- Two truths and a lie. Works especially well when the group is half friends and half friends of friends.
- The name game. Everyone writes famous names on scraps of paper, they go into a glass, and teams take turns describing as many as they can in a minute. Then the same names with one word only. Then acting only. It gets louder every round.
The office happy hour
Mixed departments, a few people who only know each other from email. You want something that gets everyone talking without putting anyone on the spot.
Faker is ideal. Everyone gets a secret word except the faker, each person gives a one-word clue, and the group votes. A round takes a few minutes, it’s easy to understand after watching once, and it’s fun to discover that the quiet one from accounts is a superb liar.
Tier List is the other good one. Everyone ranks the same category from S to F in secret, then the group’s list is revealed, along with the item that divided the room most. Food categories at a happy hour are asking for trouble, in the best way.
The virtual happy hour
A video call with a drink in hand needs games even more than a real bar does, because silence on a call is twice as awkward.
Doodle Gallery gets the biggest laughs: everyone draws the same prompt on their phone, then the anonymous gallery opens and the whole call reacts at once. Outwit the AI is a good second game. You write clues for your secret word that your colleagues will understand and the AI won’t, which is where in-jokes from the team chat come in handy.
We’ve written more about games for video calls if your happy hour is mostly remote.
A word on drinking
Not everyone at happy hour drinks, and none of these games need alcohol. We’d skip drinking games entirely at a work event. Nobody remembers the game, but everybody remembers who had to be put in a taxi.
Setting it up
One person opens a room at play.guezzer.com and shows the QR code, or drops the link in the group chat. Everyone else joins on their own phone, no accounts, no downloads. Whoever arrives late scans the code and joins the next round.
