Think Fast»Free resources»Games to play on Zoom with coworkers
Meeting in 20 minutes?
The calendar says "Team Social" and it starts in twenty minutes. You don't need a philosophy of connection — you need a game that works with a link and whatever attention span survives a Thursday afternoon. These are sorted by how much time you have.
Everything here works on Zoom, and nearly all of it works identically on Meet or Teams, because the games live in browsers and on phones, not inside the meeting software. One entry is ours; it's labeled.
You can start any of these before the last person finishes joining.
Go to skribbl.io, create a private room, and paste the link in the meeting chat. Players take turns drawing while everyone else guesses in the game's chat. If you have ninety spare seconds, type your company's acronyms and product names into the custom words box — that's the difference between a game and an event.
Announce a start article and a target — "Cheese" to "Moon landing," say. Everyone opens the start page and races to the target clicking only links inside articles. First to arrive screen-shares their path, which is where the actual entertainment lives.
Create a free room at codenames.game and drop the link in chat — no accounts needed. Split into two teams (birthdays January–June versus July–December settles it instantly), appoint one spymaster each, and talk over the meeting audio. It runs itself once people can see the grid.
On TypeRacer, create a private race track and share the link. Everyone types the same passage, little cars advance across the screen, and someone discovers a coworker types at highway speed and never lets it go. Best of three, then stop while it's still fun.
You type a movie as emoji into the meeting chat — 🦈🏖️😱 — and the first correct guess wins and posts the next one. No tools, no links, works when half the call is on a train. TV shows and internal projects make good later rounds.
Everyone grabs one object within arm's reach that has a story and gets sixty seconds to tell it. Name the first storyteller; they pick who's next. It's the only entry on this page that produces conversation instead of competition, and some Thursdays that's the right call.
Telephone crossed with Pictionary: prompts get drawn, drawings get described, and every chain mutates into chaos. It's technically zero-prep, but spend your ten minutes writing good starter prompts and planning the finale — the host screen-shares each chain and performs a dramatic reading. The reading is the event. Don't skip the reading.
If anyone owns a Party Pack: launch the game, share your screen with the "share sound" box checked — checked, we're serious — and players join at jackbox.tv with the room code on their phones. Quiplash is the safe first pick. The ten minutes mostly covers the audio test you were going to need anyway.
Before the call, write ten prompts: "something you've owned over ten years," "your most defensible mug," "a book you'll never finish." Read one at a time; everyone has sixty seconds to fetch the item and hold it to the camera. Points for speed, bonus points awarded corruptly by you.
Write a word list in a notes file, split the call into two teams, and feed each drawer their word by direct message. They draw on the shared whiteboard while their team shouts guesses — sixty seconds a word. The setup time is mostly writing words hard enough to be funny. "Synergy" is hard enough to be funny.
The ten minutes is installation: it's a cheap phone-and-PC game where crewmates do tasks and impostors quietly pick them off. House rule for the call: everyone mutes during rounds, unmutes for the accusation meetings. The accusation meetings are where the team building, loosely defined, occurs.
Here's the problem with almost everything above: it quietly assumes a dozen players. Past twenty, turn-based games become theater with a large, restless audience, and the audience starts checking Slack. Big calls need games where everyone acts on every round.
Full disclosure: this one's ours. Everyone answers every question from their own phone — typed answers, not multiple choice — while you share the question-and-reveal screen on the call. That's what makes a 60-person game feel like 60 people playing instead of 6 playing and 54 watching. AI writes rounds about your company, and it's self-run: no host to book, and the organizer gets to play too. Free up to 8 players if you want to test it on your own team first; paid passes go to 250 with a 72-hour event window.
The shameless plug
Think Fast is live typed-answer trivia on everyone's phone — free for up to 8 players, flat $99 for events up to 50 with AI-written rounds about your company. No app installs, no host to schedule, full refund if the team doesn't love it.
Play a free round See event pricingWrite five multiple-choice questions about the team or the company into Zoom's polls before the call starts — and confirm your account has polling enabled now, not live. Launch one poll between agenda items and read the results with commentary. Need material? Raid our office trivia questions.
Before the call, collect one surprising fact per person with a quick form. Live, you read a fact and everyone types a guess into the chat at once — the simultaneous wall of wrong names is the fun part. The person revealed gets thirty seconds of backstory. The prep is real, but it's one email.
Use a free bingo-card generator to build custom cards — "someone says 'circle back,'" "dog appears," "presenter forgets they're muted" — and send everyone a card link before the call. First bingo in the chat wins. It runs underneath the actual meeting, which is arguably the best feature on this entire page.
Every one of these failure modes is survivable, and every one of them has killed a game this week somewhere.
The Share Sound checkbox. Every Jackbox session in history has opened with three minutes of "wait, can anyone hear the music?" When you share your screen, check "share sound." Do it before anyone has the chance to ask.
The 45-minute game in the 30-minute slot. Games don't compress. Ending Gartic Phone before the reveal is worse than never playing it. When in doubt, pick the shorter game — a great fifteen minutes beats a truncated forty-five every time.
Hotel wifi takes hostages. Anything real-time and turn-based dies when one player lags — sixteen people watching a frozen avatar think. Games where everyone submits answers independently (trivia, Gartic Phone, polls) degrade gracefully: the laggy player misses a beat, not the whole room.
Fun facts that are HR events. Never require personal disclosure. "Nearest object with a story" lets people choose their own exposure level; "most embarrassing moment" chooses it for them. One is a game. The other is a deposition.
No ending. A game needs a scoreboard and a declared winner, or it doesn't end — it dissolves, and everyone quietly returns to email feeling vaguely embarrassed. Announce the final round before you play it. Crown someone. Then stop.
The organizer who never gets to play. If running the game means you spend the whole call reading questions and tallying scores in a spreadsheet, you didn't attend the social — you staffed it. Favor games that run themselves, and let whoever organized the thing actually win it once in a while.
Emoji pitch needs literally nothing but the chat box; skribbl.io needs one link. If your window is the last few minutes of a real meeting rather than a dedicated call, work from our 5-minute team building activities instead — different constraint, different playbook.
Almost all of them, unchanged — the games run in browsers and on phones, so the meeting software just carries voice and screen share. The only Zoom-specific picks are polls and the whiteboard, and both Teams and Meet have their own equivalents.
Rounds, team names, a scoreboard, and a host with opinions. It's less work than it sounds, and most of it is knowing the order of operations — we wrote the full playbook in how to run office trivia.
Put the game in the invite so nobody's ambushed, never require cameras, and favor games where everyone acts at once over games where people perform one at a time. Then end early. Reluctant participation is almost always the memory of a game that ran twenty minutes too long.