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Minute to win it games for work: 30 one-minute team challenges

Guezzer content team · 12 November 2026

30 one-minute challenges for work teams, with cups, paper, balloons or nothing at all, plus scoring, a running order and versions for video calls.

A minute to win it game is a tiny physical or mental challenge with a sixty-second limit. Stack these cups into a pyramid. Get three crumpled balls of paper into the bin. Name twenty fruits before the timer goes. Each one is daft on its own, but put eight of them together and split the room into teams, and you have one of the easiest team activities you can run at work.

They suit an office for a few reasons. Each round lasts one minute, so nobody gets bored waiting. The rules fit in one sentence. Nobody needs to be good at trivia, sport or talking in front of people, and the most senior person in the room fails at stacking cups just as often as the intern. And the props come from a supermarket and the stationery cupboard.

Below are 30 challenges, grouped by what they need, then how to score them, a running order for a 30-minute session and what tends to go wrong. If you need something shorter for the start of a meeting, our post on quick team games for work has two to fifteen minute warm-ups and energisers.

How a session works

Teams. Split into teams of three to five. Smaller teams mean everyone gets a go; larger ones mean more people watching and shouting advice, which is half the fun. Mix departments if you can.

Who plays. For each challenge, the team sends one or two players, or the whole team plays together, depending on the challenge. Keep a rule that nobody plays a second time until everyone on their team has played once.

Timing. One person runs the clock and nothing else. A phone stopwatch works, but a big timer on a screen works better, because the whole room can see the last ten seconds.

Scoring. Keep it simple:

• Finish the challenge inside the minute: 3 points.
• Get at least halfway: 1 point.
• Fastest team to finish a challenge: 1 bonus point.

Write the scores on a whiteboard or flipchart after every round. A visible leaderboard does more for the energy in the room than any prize.

Rounds. Eight to ten challenges fill about half an hour with a room of twenty. Pick a mix: a couple where one person plays, a couple where pairs play, and at least two where the whole team plays at once, so nobody stands around for long.

What to get beforehand

Most of the challenges below need some of the following:

• 30 to 40 paper or plastic cups per team (the cheap, light, stackable kind)
• A few packs of plain paper and some sticky notes
• Ping-pong balls, a bag of balloons and a box of paperclips
• Elastic bands, a roll of tape and some string
• Coins, a pack of playing cards and some dice
• A couple of empty bottles and some pens

Two tips that save a lot of trouble. First, try every challenge yourself before the day, against a real timer. If you can’t do it in a minute, the room probably can’t either, so make it easier. Second, set up the props for each challenge on a separate tray or in a separate bag, so the changeover between rounds takes seconds, not minutes.

With cups

1. Stack attack. Build a pyramid of 21 cups (six on the bottom, then five, four, three, two, one), then collapse it back into a single stack. Both parts have to be done inside the minute. For a harder version, make it 36 cups.

2. Flip it. Line up six upside-down cups along the edge of a table, rims hanging slightly over. Flip each one the right way up by flicking the rim from below, one cup at a time. As a relay, each team member flips two.

3. Bounce in. Bounce a ping-pong ball once on the table and into a cup. Get three in to finish. Move the cup further away for the next round.

4. Card tower. Build a tower of cups and playing cards: a cup, then a card on top, then another cup, and so on. Ten storeys to finish. It looks easy until about storey seven.

5. Blow it along. Put five cups in a row, each half full of water, with a ping-pong ball in the first one. Blow the ball from cup to cup without using your hands. One player each, and keep some paper towels close.

6. Knock them down. Build a pyramid of ten cups at the end of a table. From two metres away, players knock the cups off the table by firing elastic bands. Every cup has to be off to finish.

With paper and things from your desk

7. Paper tower. Using five sheets of A4 and nothing else (no tape, no scissors), build the tallest free-standing tower you can. The tower has to stand for five seconds after the minute ends. This is the best whole-team challenge in the list, because it needs a plan.

8. Paperclip chain. Make the longest chain of paperclips you can in sixty seconds. One player or a pair. Measure at the end, or count the clips.

9. Bin shot. Three crumpled balls of paper, one bin, three metres away. Players take turns throwing. Get all three in to finish, and every miss is fetched by the thrower.

10. Paper plane landing. Fold a plane from one sheet and land it inside a target zone marked on the floor with tape. You can refold between throws, but the clock keeps running.

11. Sticky note wall. One player stands still while their teammates stick as many sticky notes on their sleeves, back and shoulders as they can. Any note that falls off before the count doesn’t count.

12. Pen in the bottle. Tie a pen to a piece of string and tie the other end round the player’s waist so the pen hangs at about knee height. Lower the pen into the neck of a bottle on the floor without using your hands. Three bottles to finish.

13. Desk-drawer tower. Build the tallest tower you can from whatever is on one desk: staplers, mugs, notebooks, a hole punch. It has to stand for five seconds after the minute.

14. Unroll it. Hold the end of a roll of sticky tape and unroll it along a corridor while a teammate walks the roll away, without it twisting or sticking to itself. The longest clean strip wins. Messy, quick and very loud.

With balloons and balls

15. Keep it up. The whole team keeps three balloons in the air for the full minute. Nobody can touch the same balloon twice in a row, and a balloon that touches the floor ends the attempt. Check nobody on the team has a latex allergy first, or use latex-free balloons.

16. Balloon relay. Pairs carry a balloon between their shoulders, or between their backs, from one end of the room to the other and back. No hands. Each pair takes over from the last.

17. Spoon run. Carry a ping-pong ball on a spoon to the other side of the room and back. Drop it, and you start that leg again. As a relay, every team member does one leg.

18. Ball in the cup, team edition. One player holds a cup on their head while the rest of the team, behind a line, tosses ping-pong balls into it. Three balls in the cup to finish.

With coins, cards and dice

19. Coin tower. Stack twenty coins into a single tower using one hand only. Anything that topples has to be restacked.

20. Suit sort. Shuffle the thirteen cards of one suit, hand them over face down, and the player has to lay them out from ace to king. Easy to start, hard with the team counting down from ten.

21. Dice on a stick. Hold a lolly stick or a pen flat in one hand and balance five dice on top of it, one at a time. Hold all five for three seconds to finish.

22. House of cards. Build a card house with two levels: two leaning pairs on the bottom, a flat card across them, and one pair on top. Two players, one pack.

With nothing at all

23. Alphabet run. Pick a category (fruit, cities, things in an office) and go through the alphabet as a team, one item per letter, each player taking the next letter. Skip Q, X and Z if you’re feeling kind. Reach the end of the alphabet to finish.

24. Twenty in a minute. One player names twenty things in a category before the time runs out: car brands, pizza toppings, words that rhyme with “cat”. The team counts out loud.

25. Memory tray. Put twenty small objects on a tray. The team studies it for thirty seconds, then the tray is covered and they have thirty seconds to write down as many as they can remember.

26. Silent line-up. The whole team lines up in order of birthday, January to December, without saying a word. Pointing and holding up fingers is allowed. Check the order out loud at the end.

27. Logo from memory. Name a famous logo, and each player draws it from memory in one minute. The other teams vote on which drawing is closest. Expect a lot of very wrong coffee shop mermaids.

On a video call

Remote teams can do minute to win it too, as long as each challenge only uses what people have at home or on their desk.

28. Fetch it. Call out an item (“something blue”, “a mug with writing on it”, “a book with a red cover”) and everyone has one minute to fetch it and hold it up to the camera. The last one back, or anyone without the item, loses the point.

29. Desk tower, remote. Everyone builds the tallest tower they can from things within arm’s reach, then shows it on camera at the end of the minute. The tallest one still standing wins.

30. Draw it blind. Everyone draws a simple thing (a bicycle, a house, a cat) without looking at the paper, then holds it up at the end of the minute. The team votes on the best and the worst.

Alphabet run, twenty in a minute and the logo challenge all work on a call as well. For more ideas for calls, see games to play on a video call and online games for remote teams.

A running order for 30 minutes

For four teams of five people:

The gaps between challenges are not wasted. Showing the next challenge, demonstrating it once and resetting the props takes about two minutes each time, and that’s when teams argue about who plays next.

Making it work for everyone

• Always have a seated option. Anything that involves running across the room can also be done at a table. If someone can’t or doesn’t want to play the physical rounds, they can be the team’s timekeeper or score checker.
• Keep food out of it. Skip challenges that involve eating or holding food in your mouth. It avoids allergy problems and is more hygienic in an office.
• One of each per person. If a challenge needs a straw or a spoon near anyone’s face, give everyone their own.
• No forfeits. Losing a round costs points, nothing else.
• Mind the noise. Balloons and bouncing balls are loud. If you’re in an open-plan office, book a meeting room or warn the people nearby.

When you have no props

Sometimes the session is in ten minutes and nobody bought cups. In that case, the challenges in the “nothing at all” section still work, and phone games can fill the gap. In Closest Wins, each round is one trivia question with a number for an answer: everyone types a guess on their own phone and the closest guess wins. The host sets how many questions you play, so it works as a one-minute round or as a whole block. In Price Check, you see a real product and guess its price. Open a room on play.guezzer.com, put the room code on the screen, and everyone joins in their phone’s browser.

What goes wrong

• The changeovers take longer than the challenges. Prepare each challenge on its own tray, and have one helper reset it while you explain the next one.
• One team runs away with it. Give the last two challenges double points. It keeps every team in it until the end.
• People argue about whether something counted. Decide the finishing rule before the clock starts (“the tower has to stand for five seconds”) and have one referee whose word is final.
• The same people play every round. Use the rule that everyone plays once before anyone plays twice, and write the names on the board.
• Nobody can do a challenge. That’s a sign it’s too hard, not that the room is useless. Make it easier on the spot: fewer cups, a closer bin, a longer string.

Questions people ask

What is minute to win it? A set of short challenges, each with a sixty-second limit, mostly done with everyday objects like cups, paper and balloons. The name comes from a TV game show, but the format is now a standard party and team activity.

How many challenges do you need for an hour? About fifteen to eighteen, allowing two to three minutes per challenge for explaining and resetting. For a 30-minute session, eight to ten is enough.

How many people can play? Any number, as long as you split into teams of three to five. With more than six teams, run two or three challenges at once at separate tables, with a timekeeper at each.

Do you need prizes? Not really. A small trophy, first pick of the cake or the right to choose the next team lunch place is plenty. The leaderboard matters more than the prize.

Does it work for remote teams? Yes, with challenges that use only what people have at home. See the video call section above.

Why it works

Most team activities ask people to talk about themselves or perform. Minute to win it asks them to stack cups while their colleagues shout advice, which is much easier. The challenges are silly, the stakes are low and everyone fails at least once, usually in public. By the end, people who barely knew each other’s names have shared a small triumph over a paper tower, and that tends to last longer than any icebreaker.