30 Fun Online Team Building Games from Hosts Who've Run 40,000+ Virtual Events

Online team building games are the fastest way to turn a grid of muted faces into a team that actually likes meeting together. We should know — as of August 2026, over 40,000 teams have booked virtual events with teambuilding.com, totaling nearly 1 million participants and 80,000+ reviews averaging 4.96 / 5. This guide is the games playbook from all of those events.

Below you will find 30 online team building games that work: hosted events ranked by real survey data, fun games with full instructions, free online games for virtual teams, and quick games you can run in the last ten minutes of a meeting. If you want the broader universe of formats beyond games — workshops, tours, and social formats — see our guide to virtual team building activities; this page sticks to games and how to run them.

This list includes:

1. What are online team building games?
2. Best online team games for work, ranked by real survey data
3. Fun online team building games
4. Free online team building games for virtual teams
5. Quick and easy online team building games
6. Online team building games for small groups
7. Online team building games for large groups
8. Where to play online team games: platforms compared
9. What we've learned from 40,000+ virtual events
10. Online team building games we don't recommend

What are online team building games?

Online team building games are games teams play together over the internet — on a video call, in a chat channel, or in a shared browser game — to build connection, communication, and team spirit. Examples include hosted game shows, Online Team Building Bingo, Skribbl, and lightning scavenger hunts. These games are also called "team building remote games," "interactive team building games," "virtual games to play with coworkers," and "online team games for work."

Online team building games are the online branch of team building games and a subcategory of virtual team building activities. They are similar to virtual group activities, video call games, and online group games, and the platform-specific versions are Zoom games, Microsoft Teams games, and Google Meet games. Within the category, this guide includes the best online team games for work, fun online team building games, free online games for virtual teams, quick and easy games, and online team building games for small and large groups; they are a core tool for remote employee engagement and a staple of virtual team events.

Games matter more online than they do in an office, because remote work does not create connection on its own. In a 2024 randomized controlled trial of 1,612 employees published in Nature, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and colleagues found that hybrid work reduced quit rates by one-third with no loss of performance — remote-friendly work is here to stay, which means the hallway conversations it replaces have to be rebuilt on purpose. A well-run game is the most reliable way we know to do that: it gives everyone a reason to unmute.

Best online team games for work, ranked by real survey data

The highest-rated way to play games online with coworkers is to have a professional host run the show, so every teammate — including whoever normally organizes these things — gets to just play. We rank our own hosted events with the Team Building Score, which combines confirmed bookings, verified reviews, ratings, and post-event survey outcomes. Here are the current top online games by that score:

Browse all hosted virtual events. Our hosts design dozens of new game concepts on an ongoing cycle: each one is play-tested internally with our own staff as the beta group, run live with client teams, iterated on using post-event surveys and reviews, and retired if it never finds its energy. Three favorites from that pipeline:

1. Online Office Games

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Online Office Games

A triathlon of virtual activities with 150,000+ participants to date.

Virtual90 min$40 pp 5.0(8,796)

Online Office Games is a series of fun games and challenges for remote teams, led by a world-class host: speedy trivia in several formats, lightning scavenger hunts, and a communication game called "Can You Hear Me Now?" The challenges are designed specifically for distributed teams — they build connections while quietly exercising remote-work skills like giving clear, concise directions on a video call.

The event runs 90 minutes and includes breakout room sessions where teammates can strategize and get to know each other between rounds. It is our most-booked virtual event, and the format that taught us most of the lessons in this guide.

Learn more about Online Office Games.

Best for: Any remote or hybrid team, 10–200+ people
Time: 90 minutes
Materials: None — a host runs everything

2. Ultimate Game Show

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Ultimate Game Show

Compete in fan favorites like Coworker Feud & Price Hike.

Virtual90 min$45 pp 5.0(5,357)

Ultimate Game Show turns your video call into a TV-style game show: teams compete through rapid-fire rounds of trivia, guessing games, and survey-says showdowns while an energetic host keeps score and keeps the jokes coming. The format is pure friendly competition — points, buzzers, and a leaderboard — which is exactly what participants tell us they love most about virtual events.

Best for: Competitive teams, big energy, 10–500+ people
Time: 90 minutes
Materials: None — a host runs everything

3. Murder in Ancient Egypt

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Murder in Ancient Egypt

Work together on puzzles & solve a real (ancient) murder mystery.

Virtual90 min$45 pp 4.9(9,828)

Murder in Ancient Egypt uses the mechanics of escape rooms — puzzles, code-breaking, riddles, and scavenger hunts — to get your team solving a murder together. The twist: the crime is a real mystery from ancient Egypt, and after your teams lock in their guess, our master storyteller shares the big reveal. Teams from companies like HubSpot, Reddit, and Pepsi have played it, and it remains one of our most-booked online murder mystery games.

Why does the puzzle structure work so well for teams? Here is teambuilding.com host Andrew Orsie: "The puzzle should feel doable, but ideally works best when the team splits up duties and works together a bit — if everyone can feel like they've participated and contributed, it's the most connecting and satisfying version of a team building puzzle game." And on the finale: "Plot twists are fun in movies, but you don't want your murder mystery solution to come in so far out of left field that no one feels like they could've gotten the answer themselves."

Learn more about Murder in Ancient Egypt.

Best for: Puzzle-loving teams, 6–100 people
Time: 90 minutes
Materials: None — a host runs everything

Fun online team building games

These are the fun online team games we reach for when a group needs to laugh together — each one is DIY-able with full instructions:

#	Game	Group size	Time
4	Can You Hear Me Now?	4–30	15–30 min
5	Online Team Building Bingo	10–100+	10–20 min
6	Guess the Baby	5–50	15–20 min
7	Online Team Feud	10–60	30–45 min
8	Online Werewolf	5–20	30–45 min
9	Caption Contest	Any	Background or 10 min
10	Yellow Submarine	5–30	Runs for days

4. Can You Hear Me Now?

"Can You Hear Me Now?" is a communication game our hosts designed for Online Office Games, and it is playable on any video call. One player — the Describer — must get the other players — the Artists — to draw an object like a sunflower, kite, or calculator using only geometric terms. For the letter E, you might say: "Draw one vertical line, now a line from the top to the right, one from the middle to the right, and one from the bottom to the right."

To play:

1. Name one Describer per round; everyone else grabs paper and a pen.
2. The Describer gets a secret object and three minutes to describe it in shapes and lines only — no naming the object or its parts.
3. Artists reveal their drawings on camera and guess the object.
4. The Describer scores a point for each Artist who guesses correctly, and correct Artists score a point too.

The game is much harder than it sounds — and that is the point. People tend to give instructions based on what they already know the image looks like, rather than what the listener actually needs to hear, which is exactly the communication gap the game exposes. Expect the drawings to be gloriously wrong, and expect your team to talk about them for weeks.

Learn more about "Can You Hear Me Now?".

Best for: Communication practice disguised as comedy, 4–30 people
Time: 15–30 minutes
Materials: Paper and pens (free)

5. Online Team Building Bingo

Online Team Building Bingo swaps numbers for descriptions and fun facts — "has a hidden talent," "is drinking coffee right now" — and challenges players to match squares to teammates. It is one of the easiest games to run with any group size, and it reliably surfaces the interesting facts that never come up in stand-ups.

Here is a board you can start with:

To play:

1. Distribute the board to your team.
2. Play for a set amount of time, like eight to ten minutes, with players chatting or dropping facts in the chat to claim squares.
3. First to five in a row calls Bingo; count up remaining Bingos and award prizes.

Groups of 20+ can split into breakout rooms to play in parallel; small groups can stay in the main room. Bragging rights are usually a sufficient prize.

Learn more about Online Team Building Bingo and icebreaker Bingo.

Best for: Getting-to-know-you energy, 10–100+ people
Time: 10–20 minutes
Materials: Bingo boards (free above)

6. Guess the Baby

Guess the Baby is a photo guessing game: teammates submit childhood photos, the host shares them one at a time, and the group votes on who is who. The reveals are the payoff — nobody ever correctly matches the mohawk toddler to the quiet analyst.

To play:

1. Collect photos privately by email or DM a few days before the call.
2. Drop each photo on screen and collect guesses by poll or chat.
3. Reveal, award a point per correct guess, and let the photo's owner tell the story behind it.

What we've learned: toddler photos work much better than newborn photos, because recognizable features have started to develop — and unlike most games, this one actually gets better as the group gets larger, since more faces means harder matching.

Best for: Teams that have worked together a while, 5–50 people
Time: 15–20 minutes
Materials: Childhood photos, a poll tool (free)

7. Online Team Feud

Online Team Feud is a survey-says game show you build from your own office's opinions. In the week before the game, survey your team with a two-minute form — "name something that derails a video call," "name a food that should not be microwaved at work" — then reveal the top answers game-show style while two teams compete to guess them.

To play:

1. Send a five-question survey to the whole team and tally the top four to six answers per question.
2. On the call, split into two teams; alternate turns guessing the hidden answers on a shared slide deck.
3. Points equal the number of survey respondents who gave that answer; three misses passes control to the other team.

Playing with your own team's survey data is the trick — half the fun is discovering that eleven colleagues answered "reply all" and they are all willing to defend it. If you would rather have a host run the format, our hosted event Office Feud does exactly this with polished production.

Best for: Competitive groups, 10–60 people
Time: 30–45 minutes (plus a pre-game survey)
Materials: A survey form and a slide deck (free)

8. Online Werewolf

Werewolf is a social deduction classic that translates beautifully online, because it is primarily a speaking and strategy game. A narrator secretly assigns roles — Werewolves, Villagers, a Medic, and a Seer — then alternates "night" (cameras off, werewolves quietly pick a victim via DM) and "day" (cameras on, the group debates and votes on who seems suspicious).

To run it on a video call:

1. Assign roles by private message. For five players: 1 werewolf, 1 medic, 3 villagers; add 1 werewolf, 1 special role, and 3 villagers for every additional five players.
2. The narrator announces "night has fallen" — everyone turns cameras off while the werewolves, medic, and seer act via DM.
3. At sunrise, the narrator reveals the victim (or a save), and the group debates and votes to eliminate a suspect.
4. Repeat until only werewolves or villagers remain. Eliminated players become silent, friendly ghosts.

Learn more about how to play Werewolf, or use this Werewolf Zoom app to automate the roles.

Best for: Teams that love strategy and bluffing, 5–20 people
Time: 30–45 minutes
Materials: None (free)

9. Caption Contest

In a Caption Contest, teammates write hilarious taglines for a random picture — a cat in a business suit, a raccoon holding a slice of pizza — and the group votes on the winner. You can run it live on a call or let it simmer all day in a chat channel.

To play:

1. The host drops a bizarre or oddly specific image into the chat.
2. Teammates respond with their best captions.
3. The group votes with emoji reactions, or the host picks a winner.

The game works because it taps into how remote teams already communicate — fast-moving threads, GIF reactions, inside jokes. A great caption is a tiny window into how a teammate thinks.

Best for: Async play in Slack or Teams, any group size
Time: 10 minutes live, or all day in chat
Materials: One funny image (free)

10. Yellow Submarine

Yellow Submarine is a stealth game that runs across many video calls: each player crafts a small submarine — paper, cardboard, magazine cutouts — and tries to sneak it on screen during regular meetings without being noticed. Hide it in your background, float it past the bottom of the frame, blend it into your coffee mug.

Scoring: one point every time your submarine appears on camera; if a teammate spots it and calls it out, you are out of the game (you keep the point). When everyone is out, tally points and crown the Yellow Submarine Captain. The incentive design is the fun part — showing your sub often earns points but risks getting caught, so meetings develop a delightful undercurrent of periscope-spotting.

Best for: Teams with lots of recurring calls, 5–30 people
Time: Runs in the background for days or weeks
Materials: Craft supplies (free)

Free online games for virtual teams

Every DIY game in this guide is free to run, but these five are free platforms — browser games your team can open and play in minutes, no budget approval required:

#	Game	Group size	Time
11	Skribbl	3–20	15–30 min
12	Gartic Phone	4–30	15–30 min
13	Codenames Online	4–12	15–30 min
14	Spreadsheet Battleship	2–20	20–30 min
15	Free Online Escape Rooms	4–10 per room	45–60 min

11. Skribbl

Skribbl.io is a free multiplayer drawing-and-guessing game — Pictionary in a browser. Players take turns drawing a secret word while everyone else races to guess it in the chat; blanks show the word's letters, and faster guesses score more points. Correct guessers are marked without revealing the word, so the round stays live for everyone else.

Create a private room, share the link on your video call, and screen-share the drawer's canvas if anyone gets lost. Up to 20 players can join a private room, and a custom word list — seeded with your company's inside jokes — makes the game roughly twice as funny.

Best for: Instant, zero-setup laughs, 3–20 people
Time: 15–30 minutes
Materials: Free browser game

12. Gartic Phone

Gartic Phone is the telephone game crossed with drawing: every player writes a silly sentence, then players alternate drawing the previous person's sentence and describing the previous person's drawing. After a few rounds, the game plays back each chain like a slideshow — and the mutation from "cat piloting a helicopter" to whatever it became is reliably the hardest a remote team laughs all quarter.

To play, create a free room, share the invite link, and pick a mode — "Normal" is perfect for first-timers. The playback is the main event, so screen-share it in the main room with everyone unmuted.

Best for: Creative teams, guaranteed laughter, 4–30 people
Time: 15–30 minutes
Materials: Free browser game

13. Codenames Online

Codenames is a word-association game of pure teamwork: two spymasters give one-word clues that connect multiple words on a shared 25-word grid, while their teams try to find their agents without hitting the assassin. The official free web version handles the board, so your call handles the agonized deliberation — which is where the team building happens.

Split the call into two teams, appoint spymasters, and keep a group chat or breakout room per team for debate. The game rewards knowing how your teammates think, and it gets better every time the same group plays.

Best for: Word lovers and deep-thinking teams, 4–12 people
Time: 15–30 minutes per match
Materials: Free official web app

14. Spreadsheet Battleship

Spreadsheet Battleship turns the software your team already lives in into a game board. Each player or pair builds a 10×10 grid in a shared spreadsheet, secretly places five ships, and then teams alternate calling shots — "B7!" — while marking hits and misses in their own grid.

To set up:

1. Make one spreadsheet tab per team with a labeled 10×10 grid; ships occupy 2–5 consecutive cells.
2. Teams place ships privately, then hop on a call and alternate calling coordinates.
3. Mark hits red and misses gray; first team to sink the whole fleet wins.

It is delightfully low-tech, it works behind even the strictest corporate firewall, and there is something deeply satisfying about defeating the finance team in their own habitat.

Best for: Office-tool humor, 2–20 people
Time: 20–30 minutes
Materials: A shared spreadsheet (free)

15. Free Online Escape Rooms

Online escape rooms are collaborative puzzle chains — find clues, crack codes, "escape" before the clock runs out — and there are solid free versions built in forms and slides that a team of four to ten can play on any call. Free rooms are usually a series of linked riddles; teams work in a breakout room and race other teams or the timer.

This format is ideal for small groups, because with fewer players everyone gets their hands on a puzzle. Here is our list of free online escape rooms — and if you want the fully produced version with live actors, our hosted game Solverance traps your team inside a suspiciously cheerful corporation with three professional hosts playing characters.

Best for: Puzzle-loving small teams, 4–10 per room
Time: 45–60 minutes
Materials: Free printable or form-based rooms

Quick and easy online team building games

These quick online games need zero prep and fit inside the first or last ten minutes of a meeting — the easiest way to make game time a habit rather than an event:

#	Game	Group size	Time
16	Lightning Scavenger Hunts	Any	5–15 min
17	Ten Strikes	5–25	10–15 min
18	Best Wrong Answer	Any	5–10 min
19	Tabloid Headlines	Any	10 min
20	Virtual Charades	6–20	15–30 min

16. Lightning Scavenger Hunts

Lightning Scavenger Hunts are a format our hosts designed to get remote teammates up and moving: the host fires off a rapid series of clues, and players dash from their desks to find matching objects and win points. "Bring back your favorite mug" becomes a sprint, and the mug stories become the conversation.

Clue ideas to start with: something you have owned for more than ten years, the most colorful thing within reach, a souvenir from a trip, something you should have thrown away by now. Award bonus points for the best story, not just the fastest sprint — the stories are where the connection happens.

Here are more lightning scavenger hunt ideas and virtual scavenger hunt templates.

Best for: Energy resets mid-meeting, any group size
Time: 5–15 minutes
Materials: A clue list (free)

17. Ten Strikes

Ten Strikes is a get-to-know-you elimination game. All players hold up ten fingers on camera; players take turns sharing one true statement about themselves — "I have a pen pal" — and everyone for whom the statement is not true puts a finger down. Run out of fingers and you are out; last player standing wins.

The strategy is to share facts unique enough that everyone else loses a finger — which is exactly what makes the game good team building, because the winning moves are the most interesting personal stories. Play Five Strikes for a faster round, or Twenty Strikes if the team is on a roll.

This game is a cousin of Never Have I Ever questions.

Best for: New teams and new hires, 5–25 people
Time: 10–15 minutes
Materials: Ten fingers (free)

18. Best Wrong Answer

Best Wrong Answer flips quiz night on its head: the host asks an easy question — "What do you use an umbrella for?" — and players compete to give the funniest, most confidently incorrect answer in the chat. The winning wrong answer to "What's the best way to cook pasta?" might be, "Put it in the toaster and hope for the best."

Beyond the laughs, the game quietly breaks the stigma around not knowing things. Remote workers often hesitate to ask questions for fear of looking silly; a game that celebrates ridiculous answers makes the real questions easier to ask later.

Best for: Warming up a quiet call, any group size
Time: 5–10 minutes
Materials: A question list (free)

19. Tabloid Headlines

In Tabloid Headlines, each teammate writes an over-the-top news headline about their own work life: "Remote Worker Discovers New Time Zone, Accidentally Attends 3 AM Meeting" or "Employee Finally Clears Inbox, Immediately Gets 47 More Emails." The team votes for the most dramatic, relatable, or laugh-out-loud entry.

The game doubles as a pressure valve — it surfaces the unseen struggles of remote work in a way that gets laughed with, not complained about — and it gives quieter teammates a written format where their humor can shine.

Best for: Async or live play, any group size
Time: 10 minutes
Materials: A chat channel (free)

20. Virtual Charades

Charades works on a video call with two fixes our hosts swear by, because the classic version can lose energy inside a camera frame: spotlight the actor so everyone sees the performance full-screen, and keep rounds to a strict sixty seconds so the pace never sags.

Here is a random charades word generator for your prompts:

To play:

1. Split into two teams and pick an acting order.
2. The actor generates a prompt, the host spotlights them, and the sixty-second clock starts.
3. Teammates shout guesses; if they miss, the other team can steal.

Best for: Expressive teams, 6–20 people
Time: 15–30 minutes
Materials: Prompt generator (free above)

Online team building games for small groups

These games rely on discussion and turn-taking, which makes them best for small teams — in our experience the practical dividing line is about 15 people, below which a game can stay personal and high-touch without breakout rooms:

#	Game	Group size	Time
21	Something in Common	4–15	15–20 min
22	Pub-Style Trivia	6–15	30–45 min
23	Truth or Dare: Remote Work Edition	4–15	15–30 min
24	Desert Island Survival	4–15	20–30 min
25	Backwards Storytelling	5–15	10–20 min

21. Something in Common

Something in Common sends small groups hunting for surprising similarities. Teams of four or five get a few minutes to find three things they all share — "we all have cats, none of us was born in this state, and we all loved Hamilton" — then share their finds with the full group.

Each round, add restrictions: no locations, no pets, no food preferences. The restrictions force the conversation deeper, and by round three teams are discovering genuinely unusual common ground. Small groups are the whole trick here — six people can discover something unusual they share; sixty people usually cannot.

Check out our icebreakers for large groups if you need the big-room version.

Best for: New or newly merged teams, 4–15 people
Time: 15–20 minutes
Materials: None (free)

22. Pub-Style Trivia

You do not need a pub for pub trivia — just two or more teams, a question list, and a way to submit answers. Send teams to breakout rooms with five questions at a time in rounds of five to ten minutes, then reconvene for the answer reveal. Teams can submit via a form, or grade themselves on the honor system.

Because you are online, do not limit yourself to text questions: ultra-zoomed photos, five-second audio clips, and "real product or made up?" rounds play brilliantly on screens. Here are instructions for virtual trivia and a big list of trivia questions to build from.

Best for: Knowledge-proud teams, 6–15 people (or scaled up with breakouts)
Time: 30–45 minutes
Materials: Question list, optional form (free)

23. Truth or Dare: Remote Work Edition

This is a safe-for-work Truth or Dare optimized for video calls. The host calls on a player, they pick truth or dare, complete the challenge, and choose who goes next.

Here is a tool to generate random truth prompts:

And this one creates random dares:

For a variation, play Blackout Truth or Dare: the host poses one prompt to everyone, players willing to do it keep their cameras on while everyone else goes dark, and the host picks a volunteer from the lit tiles. The camera mechanic quietly adds a layer of consent — nobody is ever put on the spot without opting in.

Here is a list with more question games.

Best for: Teams that already have some rapport, 4–15 people
Time: 15–30 minutes
Materials: Prompt generators (free above)

24. Desert Island Survival

Desert Island Survival is a discussion game: stranded on a desert island, each player may take three of the ten to fifteen items on offer — fire starter, water purifier, tent, multipurpose knife, fishing net, flashlight, rope — and must defend their picks to the group before a final vote scores each item's usefulness.

The scenario is an excuse; the game is really about hearing how teammates reason, negotiate, and change their minds. The best discussion scenarios have no obviously correct answer, which keeps the debate about thinking styles rather than trivia. Run it in breakout rooms for groups over ten, or as one lively main-room debate for smaller teams.

Best for: Hearing how teammates think, 4–15 people
Time: 20–30 minutes
Materials: An item list (free)

25. Backwards Storytelling

Backwards Storytelling starts with an ending — "And that's how we lost all our company pens" — and works backward, one sentence per teammate, until the story reaches a beginning. Teammates race to type the next line in the chat, and only the fastest contributions make the story.

Each player contributes exactly one sentence, so a ten-person team must build a coherent story in exactly ten lines. For groups over ten, split into breakout rooms, build competing stories, and vote on which one makes the most (or the most entertaining) sense.

Best for: Creative teams, 5–15 people
Time: 10–20 minutes
Materials: A chat window (free)

Online team building games for large groups

Large-group online games need simultaneous participation — polls, chats, and breakout rooms — so a crowd of 20, 100, or 500 can all play at once instead of waiting for a turn:

#	Game	Group size	Time
26	Overrated/Underrated	20–500+	10–20 min
27	Online Pictionary	20–100	20–30 min
28	Slides with Friends	20–500	20–45 min
29	Mysterious Acronym Game	20–100	Async or 15 min
30	Jackbox Games	10–100 (with audience)	30–60 min

26. Overrated/Underrated

Overrated/Underrated is a debate game that scales to any size, because the whole crowd votes in a single recurring poll: the host reads a topic — reality TV, artificial intelligence, celebrity podcasts, plant-based diets — and everyone votes "overrated" or "underrated." After each reveal, dissenters get thirty seconds to defend the minority view and try to flip the room.

What we've learned: close votes are the most fun — a 52/48 split creates suspense and real debate, while a 95/5 split fizzles. Seed your topic list with genuinely contested picks, and drop the ones your team will all agree on.

Best for: All-hands energy, 20–500+ people
Time: 10–20 minutes
Materials: One reusable poll (free)

27. Online Pictionary

Pictionary scales to big groups through breakout rooms. Divide players into rooms of six to eight, have each person draw three clues from a random word generator, and let rooms play in parallel — one point per correctly guessed drawing, no points for skips. After fifteen minutes, reconvene and compare scores.

Vary the rules between rounds: verbs instead of nouns, non-drawing-hand rounds, or a lightning round of thirty-second sketches. Here are more online Pictionary games.

Best for: Breaking a big event into rooms, 20–100 people
Time: 20–30 minutes
Materials: Word generator, paper or whiteboard tool (free)

28. Slides with Friends

Slides With Friends turns a slide deck into a mass-participation game: players scan a QR code with their phones and respond to interactive slides — quizzes, word clouds, photo challenges, sound reactions — with everyone's answers appearing live on the shared screen. The platform ships ready-to-play decks, or you can build your own with company in-jokes.

Games run free for up to 10 players, with paid plans (from roughly $96/year) covering groups of 50 or more. Learn more about Slides with Friends and check out more presentation games.

Best for: All-hands and company-wide events, 20–500 people
Time: 20–45 minutes
Materials: Free up to 10 players; paid plans beyond

29. Mysterious Acronym Game

The Mysterious Acronym Game is a creativity challenge built for chat tools, which makes it effortless at scale. The host posts a nonsense acronym — "LMBQ" — and teams race to invent the funniest plausible meaning ("Let Me Buy Quiche") in their own threads, then vote with emoji reactions.

To play:

1. Start one thread per team in a shared channel and tag members into their threads.
2. Each team gets the same acronym; every player must contribute at least one meaning.
3. Teams emoji-vote their favorite, then post their winner to the main channel for a final all-company vote.

The game generates instant inside jokes — and the winning acronyms have a way of entering the company vocabulary permanently.

Best for: Async play across time zones, 20–100 people
Time: 15 minutes live, or a day async
Materials: A chat channel (free)

30. Jackbox Games

Jackbox Games is a library of 60+ polished party games — trivia, drawing duels, word games, bluffing games — that one person launches and screen-shares while everyone else plays from their phones using a room code. For work calls, start with the crowd-pleasers: Quiplash (funny answers), Drawful (terrible drawings), and Fibbage (bluffing).

To play with a remote team:

1. One player buys and launches a party pack, then screen-shares the game with sound.
2. Teammates join at Jackbox.tv on their phones with the room code.
3. Players beyond the per-game cap join as the audience and vote on winners.

The audience mechanic is what makes Jackbox work for bigger groups — latecomers and quiet teammates still get to influence the outcome without performing.

Best for: Game nights and happy hours, 10–100 people with audience mode
Time: 30–60 minutes
Materials: One-time party pack purchase (~$30)

Where to play: game platforms compared

Here is how the main options for online team games compare, from fully hosted events to free browser games:

Platform	Format	Group size	Pricing
teambuilding.com Originals	Hosted 90-minute events with professional hosts	10–1,000+	Per-group quote by headcount
Jackbox Games	Screen-shared party games, phones as controllers	Up to 10 players + audience	One-time party packs (~$30)
Slides With Friends	Interactive slide-deck games via QR code	3–500	Free up to 10; paid plans for 50+
Skribbl	Browser drawing-and-guessing rooms	3–20	Free
Gartic Phone	Browser telephone-drawing chains	4–30	Free
Codenames Online	Official word-game web app	4–12	Free

The DIY games in this guide need nothing more than your existing video call and chat tools — and among the virtual events booked on teambuilding.com, clients host 82% on Zoom, 11% on Microsoft Teams, 4% on Google Meet, and 2% on Webex, so every game above is written to work on all four. If your team lives on Zoom, here is our dedicated list of Zoom games.

What we've learned from 40,000+ virtual events

Running online games at this volume produces patterns. Here is what the data — and our hosts — keep teaching us:

Competition is the engine. When we mine our reviews for what participants actually loved, friendly competition comes up again and again — points, buzzers, leaderboards, and team names give a session energy and a reason to stay engaged, while the stakes stay low: usually nothing more than bragging rights.

Games that force turn-taking build better teams. This one has research behind it: in studies of 699 people working in small groups published in Science, Anita Woolley and colleagues found that a group's collective intelligence was not strongly correlated with members' average individual intelligence — but was correlated with social sensitivity and equality of conversational turn-taking. Good game mechanics — one sentence per player, one clue per person, rotating describers — are turn-taking equality machines, which is a real reason games beat unstructured hangouts.

About 15 people is the dividing line. Below roughly 15 participants, online games can run personal and high-touch with many short rounds; above it, you need structured hosting, breakout rooms, polls, and fewer, longer rounds so everyone still participates. Match the game to your headcount before you fall in love with it — that is why this guide splits small group and large group games.

Book 60–90 minutes. 88% of virtual team building events run 60 to 90 minutes, making it by far the most common format length — and when clients book shorter sessions, nine times out of ten they say afterward that they wish they had booked the full event, because under an hour the session ends right as quieter teammates warm up. For meeting games, invert the rule: ten minutes inside a sixty-minute meeting is the habit that compounds.

The host matters more than the software. Roughly one in five published reviews of our virtual events mention the host by name — participants remember who ran the show, not which platform it ran on. For DIY games, that means your emcee choice matters: pick someone who enjoys the mic, and rotate the role so it never becomes a chore. Remote connection is a topic our leadership has been asked about since the earliest lockdown days, including in The Economist's "The World Ahead: The Future of Work" — and the answer has stayed the same: distributed teams thrive when connection is scheduled, structured, and fun.

Online games we don't recommend

Some formats consistently fail on video calls. Having hosted virtual events since 2020, here is what we would skip — and what to run instead:

Idea	Why skip it	Run instead
Virtual karaoke	Latency breaks the sing-along, and the mic pressure lands on one person at a time.	Jackbox Games — group play, no solos
Unstructured charades	Acting into a webcam with no spotlight or clock loses energy fast.	Virtual Charades with spotlight + 60-second rounds
Virtual dance parties and talent shows	Individual camera pressure — most of the team turns their video off and disengages.	Overrated/Underrated — everyone plays at once
Movie or video watch parties	Too passive to build connection; people multitask within minutes.	Pub-Style Trivia with movie-clip rounds
Marathon game sessions	Online attention has a ceiling — past the 90-minute mark, even great games sag.	60–90 minutes, or a recurring quick game habit
Mandatory on-camera performances	Forcing the spotlight converts reluctant teammates into no-shows.	Opt-in mechanics like Blackout Truth or Dare

Final Thoughts

The best online team building games share three traits: everyone gets a turn, the competition is friendly, and the setup never upstages the fun. Start with one quick game in your next team meeting, graduate to a monthly free browser game session, and when you want the full production — host, points, and a leaderboard your team will argue about for weeks — book a hosted online game and just play.

Whatever you pick, put it on the calendar. Online connection does not happen by accident, and thirty minutes of games does more for a distributed team than any amount of "we should really do something soon."

Next, check out our lists of virtual game night ideas, Google Meet games, and guessing games to play with your team.