Online games for remote teams: what to play on Slack, Teams or Zoom (and how to make it stick)
Games for remote and hybrid teams, live on a call or async in Slack and Teams across time zones, plus a weekly routine, ideas for camera-shy people and what to avoid.
An office runs on small moments nobody plans. Someone makes a bad joke by the kettle, two people from different teams end up in the same lift, a birthday cake turns up on a Thursday. A remote team gets none of that for free. Everything happens in a meeting with an agenda, and when the meeting ends, everyone vanishes back into their own window.
Games won’t fix that on their own, but they’re one of the few things that reliably get a distributed team laughing at the same thing at the same time. This post is about doing it in a way that people actually look forward to: what to play live on a call, what works asynchronously across time zones, and how to turn it into a habit rather than a one-off “fun Friday” that nobody mentions again.
If you’re after five-minute warm-ups for the start of a meeting, our post on quick team games for work covers those. This one is about remote teams specifically.
What’s different about remote
A game that works in an office can fall flat on a call. A few things to keep in mind:
- People are in different situations. One person is in a quiet home office, another is on a laptop at the kitchen table with a toddler in the background, a third is on a train with patchy signal. Pick games that work on a phone and don’t need anyone to talk for long.
- Cameras are optional. Some people don’t want their camera on, and they shouldn’t have to. Games where you answer on your own screen let them join without being on show.
- Not everyone is a native speaker. In an international team, fast word games favour whoever speaks the language best. Mix them with games based on numbers, guessing or drawing.
- Time zones are real. If your team spans eight hours, someone is always joining at breakfast and someone else at the end of a long day. Some games should work without everyone being online at once.
- Silence feels longer on a call. In a room, a pause is fine. On a call, ten seconds of nobody talking feels like a minute. Games with a clear turn or a timer fill the gaps.
Live games for a call (15 to 20 minutes)
These need everyone online at the same time. The setup is the same for all of them: one person opens a room on play.guezzer.com, pastes the link into the meeting chat or Slack, and everyone joins on their phone or in a browser tab. Nothing to install on a work laptop, which saves a conversation with IT. Keep the call running for the talking.
For teams that like to compete
- Faker: everyone gets the same secret word except one person, who has to bluff through the clues. It works especially well on video, because you can watch faces when the votes come in. 3 to 12 players.
- Card Clash: everyone gets a hand of real cards (animals, countries, cars, football clubs), one person calls a stat and everyone plays a card face down. Quick, a bit lucky, and nobody needs to speak the language perfectly. 2 to 12 players.
- Doodle Gallery: everyone draws the same prompt on their phone and votes for a favourite in an anonymous gallery. Drawing levels the field: the senior engineer and the new intern are equally bad at it.
For teams that would rather play together
Not everyone enjoys beating their colleagues. Cooperative games give the team a shared opponent instead.
- Off the List: the AI secretly seals the fifteen most obvious answers to a category, such as “Things you find in a hotel room”. The team tries to come up with valid answers it didn’t predict. In the “everyone vs the AI” mode, the whole team plays on one side, which is about as close to team building as a game gets without anyone calling it that.
- Outwit the AI: each person writes a clue for a secret word that their colleagues will get but the AI won’t. It rewards shared history: the team in-joke about the printer, the client everyone remembers, last year’s offsite. The longer a team has worked together, the better it plays.
- Hot & Cold: there’s a secret word, everyone guesses at the same time, and each guess gets a rank for how close it is in meaning. Someone does win the round, but every guess lands on one shared board, so the team ends up building on each other’s ideas. It’s calmer, and good for a team that likes a puzzle.
For getting to know each other
- How Well Do You Know Me?: one person answers a question about themselves, and everyone else guesses their answer. There’s a question pack for coworkers that stays on safe ground: coffee orders, what you wear when working from home, how you really feel about Monday mornings.
- Wavelength: one person gives a short clue to a secret spot on a scale, and everyone turns their own dial to find it. It’s quiet, which suits a call, and it’s a surprisingly good way to find out how your colleagues think.
Async games for Slack or Teams
When half the team is asleep while the other half works, live games only ever include some of you. Async games run in a channel over a day or a week, and everyone joins when they’re online. None of these need an app.
- Guess the desk. Once a week, someone sends the organiser a photo of their workspace. The organiser posts it, and the team guesses whose it is in the thread. Reveal at the end of the day. People get oddly competitive about it, and you learn who has a cat.
- Caption this. Post a strange stock photo or an old office picture on Monday morning. Best caption by Friday, voted with emoji reactions, wins.
- The weekly poll. One silly either-or question a week: “Pineapple on pizza?”, “Window seat or aisle?”, “Tabs or spaces?” (Engineering teams can get properly heated over that last one.)
- Emoji film titles. Someone posts a film or song title in emoji only. First correct answer in the thread picks the next one.
- Two truths and a lie, slowly. One person posts three facts about themselves on Monday. Everyone votes on the lie during the week. Reveal on Friday. The classic party game rules post has tips for making the lie convincing.
- The team playlist. Everyone adds one song a week to a shared playlist. On Friday, people guess who added what.
Keep these in one channel, away from work threads, so people can mute them if they want.
A weekly routine that people actually keep
One-off game sessions tend to die after the first try. A small routine lasts much longer.
- Same slot every week. Fifteen minutes at the end of the Friday stand-up, or the first fifteen minutes of a Monday call. Don’t put it outside working hours. Nobody wants a “fun” event at 6pm.
- Rotate the host. Each week a different person picks the game and opens the room. It spreads the work, and you discover what everyone likes.
- Alternate competitive and cooperative. A bluffing game one week, a team-vs-the-AI game the next. Different people shine in each.
- Keep a monthly scoreboard. Write the winners in a pinned message. A tiny prize at the end of the month, such as a coffee voucher or the right to pick next month’s first game, gives it a bit of stakes.
- Stop while it’s fun. Three rounds and back to work. People will ask for more next week.
Hybrid teams
When half the team is in the office and half is at home, the worst setup is the office crowding round one laptop while the remote people watch from a tiny square on the screen.
Instead, everyone joins the game on their own phone, including the people in the office. Keep the meeting room on the call so the remote people can hear the room, but the game itself happens on everyone’s own screen. That way the person at home has exactly the same chance as the person sitting next to the manager.
For big remote meetings
At a company all-hands with fifty people, most games break down. A few things that help:
- Pick games where everyone answers at once. Closest Wins and Price Check both take up to 20 players and finish in ten minutes.
- Split into rooms. Use breakout rooms on the call and give each one its own game room. Compare the winners at the end.
- Have one person run it. A host who keeps time and reads out the results keeps fifty people from talking over each other.
Things to avoid
- Making it mandatory. The fastest way to kill it. Say clearly that it’s optional, and mean it.
- Personal questions. Nothing about salaries, relationships, politics or health. If you wouldn’t ask it in a one-to-one, leave it out.
- Putting individuals on the spot. Games where one person has to perform alone are fine for people who want that, and miserable for everyone else.
- Forgetting the new starter. In-joke games are great for a team that has been together for years, and alienating for someone in their first week. Mix in games that don’t depend on shared history.
- Running it in someone’s evening. If the game slot is at 5pm in London, it’s the middle of the night in Singapore. Rotate the time or use an async game.
Free or Pass?
All the games on Guezzer are free to play. In free rooms the games are shorter, with rounds and timers at their defaults, which suits a fifteen-minute slot anyway. If your team plays often or wants longer sessions, the person who opens the room can get a Guezzer Pass, and everyone in that room plays without ads and with every setting open. Nobody else has to buy anything. The details are on the Guezzer Pass page.
One last thing
The point isn’t the game. It’s the moment on a Friday afternoon when the whole team is laughing at someone’s terrible drawing of a hedgehog, and for a minute it doesn’t matter that you’re in six different cities. Fifteen minutes a week is enough for that, and it’s one of the best investments a remote team can make.
