Library of teambuilding games & icebreakers

Fuel teamwork and competition by challenging teams to complete a jigsaw puzzle race.

Materials needed:

• Jigsaw puzzles of varying difficulty levels
• Timer or stopwatch

Instructions on how to play:

1. Divide the team into equal groups and provide each team with a jigsaw puzzle.
2. Set a timer and have teams race against each other to complete their puzzles.
3. Emphasize that each team member must contribute to assembling the final image.
4. Celebrate the first team to finish and acknowledge their teamwork.

Why it's a great team building game:

• Piece by piece teamwork: Requires collaboration and coordination to complete the puzzle.
• Friendly competition: Adds a dash of competition to energize the team spirit.
• Problem-solving practice: Enhances problem-solving skills in a fun and engaging way.

Top tip to help the game run smoothly: Choose puzzles that match the team's preferences and skill levels. If possible, opt for puzzles that relate to the team's interests to make it more engaging.

How to play Sell me this pen

One of the most popular sales training activities and a simple workplace competition, in this game you simply hand each person a pen and have them take a turn selling it to the larger group. What is the sales pitch? What are the questions and objections? Who has the best selling points? After the activity, have a discussion about what stuck out to everyone - what worked and what didn’t. Not only does this force people to get more comfortable with public speaking, but everyone can learn some new tricks, too.

Channel your inner "Survivor" with the corporate survival challenge! Teams compete in a series of physical and mental challenges inspired by survival shows, testing their problem-solving, strategy, and endurance. Who can outwit, outplay, and outlast?

This is ideal for larger groups, giving everyone the chance to shine. It promotes teamwork, leadership, and resourcefulness—all while adding a fun, competitive edge. It’s great for building resilience and camaraderie in the workplace, with some light-hearted rivalry thrown in.

How to play:

• Organize physical and mental challenges, like obstacle courses or puzzles.
• Divide participants into teams to compete against each other.
• The team with the most points at the end of the challenges wins!

Who’s the office detective? In whodunit: office edition, your team plays out a murder mystery, with each member taking on a character to help solve the case. The goal? Work together, piece by piece, to find the culprit.

This interactive, large-group activity is great for boosting communication, creativity, and collaboration. It encourages employees to engage and think critically while embracing their roles. Plus, it’s a hilarious way to break up the day and get everyone involved in some playful, investigative fun!

How to play:

• Assign characters and a murder scenario to each participant.
• Everyone plays their role and works together to solve the mystery.
• The team that figures out “whodunit” first wins!

This is another childhood favorite for many, and bringing it into your workplace is sure to create a little nostalgia. It's a simple and fun way to get everyone more comfortable working together.

Here’s how you play:

1. Have everyone sit down, either at a desk, on the floor, or wherever it makes sense (but everyone should be sitting). Everyone should close their eyes, put their heads down, and put their thumbs up.
2. Seven players will go around the room and touch one person’s thumb apiece. Each chooser will select only one person, and they should do so as quietly and discreetly as possible. The goal is for the chosen people to guess who picked them, so the more secret, the better.
3. Once all seven people have been picked, have everyone raise their heads and ask the seven chosen people to stand up. Now, they will guess who touched their thumb. Each person gets only one guess, and if they pick correctly, they will be one of the seven “choosers” in the next round.
4. The game continues with the new seven people, including anyone who guessed correctly in the previous round. Ideally, everyone will get a chance to be one of the “pickers”.

How to play Postcard drawing

Sometimes also called “doodling together”, this activity is a fun and creative one where the group works collaboratively together to draw using postcards started by others. Have everyone get a blank postcard and then the moderator should give some direction about what to draw. Then, they lay the postcard down and the next person adds their postcard, continuing whatever pattern or drawing was started by the previous person. The process keeps going until a large drawing is completed using the postcards. You’ll need to do this in a very large room or outdoors, and have plenty of postcard-size paper and markers or crayons available.

How to play Trivia Time!

Instructions: Prepare a set of trivia questions about the company's history, products, or famous employees. Divide participants into teams and ask questions. The team with the most correct answers wins.

Materials needed: Trivia questions, answer sheets.

Get ready for Office Trivia, the brain-boggling showdown that proves knowledge is power and a hilarious conversation starter. It's a crash course in camaraderie, where teammates unite to celebrate their shared team culture and flex their mental muscles. Prepare to be enlightened, dazzled, and maybe even shocked by your team's epic achievements.

Where Do You Stand? Is a simple energizing game that’s perfect for large groups and easy to set up. All you need is an open space and a handful of ‘this or that’ questions.

Great for: Energization, session icebreaker

Duration: 10–15 minutes

You’ll need: Cones to divide the room

How to play:

• Divide the room in half with a line of small cones and then ask your group to stand more or less along the line.
• Ask a ‘this or that’ question to the group such as “pizza or pasta?” and assign an answer to each side of the room. For example, if a player wants to answer “pizza”, they need to run to the left side of the room.
• Keep the energy up by asking questions in quick succession. The idea is to get your group moving and acting impulsively.
• By the end of the game, your employees will know a little bit more about their colleagues’ preferences.

How to play Spaghetti tower

In this classic team building game, users try to build a tower using uncooked pasta noodles and marshmallows. The instructions are simple: use the tools at your disposal to design and build the tallest tower in order to win the challenge. You can judge on height alone, or weigh other factors like innovation, number of towers, or stability.

How to play Sinking boat

This popular team-building activity involves participants imagining themselves stranded on a boat that’s sinking. You’ll need to break people into small groups and instruct them on this exercise. The objective is for the group to work together to decide who should be saved from the sinking boat based on their overall importance to the group and what they value. This encourages communication, collaboration, and critical thinking skills. It’s also a good way to spark discussions about teamwork and decision-making and can give everyone insight into the talents and personalities of their colleagues.

How to play Suggestion box raffle

If you’re looking for ways to improve morale and enhance communication, try having everyone write down some thoughts. Many times, people don’t want to take the time to do so (or they’re nervous to share their real opinions). Incentivize idea-sharing by holding raffles on various entries. Have everyone write their idea, question, or discussion item down on a piece of paper and put them all in a box. Pick a few entries at random and hand out prizes accordingly.

How to play Travel back in time…

In this creative exercise, ask everyone to imagine that they are able to travel back in time to a singular event. Where would they go, and why? Most important: what would they change? What would they make sure was done differently? And, with those differences, what would the outcomes be? Would our lives be different today if their version of events had happened?

In business, an important part of strategy is thinking multiple steps ahead, and understanding “if this/then that”. This exercise asks everyone to think ahead about various repercussions of certain events. It’s a great game to play if you want to flex those strategic muscles, and also leads to some really interesting conversations.

Building stories together can help an agile team practice iteratively expanding ideas. Building stories has been helping teams grow in corporate events and quickfire meetings, so keep the focus on agile principles and you’ll be improving your employees’ collaborative skills.

Set up:

Dedicate some time to creating prompts beforehand, to make each step in the story open-ended and adaptable. Start with an opening that instigates conversation like “Our new app just launched…” The first team member adds to this line, which can turn the story in any direction, such as “Users flooded in on day one, and our servers went caput.” Encourage the next member to weave in some challenges or a milestone, with a line like “Our support team scrambled to handle user questions.” Keep iterating and adding and see where it leads. When the story ends, reflect as a team and focus on agile practices that helped them to adjust.

How to play Ghost

Ghost is a quirky little letter-building game, where the whole objective is to not be the person who finishes a word. 2 to 4 players work best. Let’s say you have a team of 3. Each person takes a turn saying a letter to begin spelling out a longer word, (e.g. F-L-O-U-). If the next person adds a letter that creates a full word, like R to create FLOUR, that person loses.

If you lose a round, you are given one letter of the word GHOST (just like the basketball game HORSE). The first person to get all 5 letters G-H-O-S-T loses the game!

Red Light Green Light is another popular team warm-up/energizer that you may remember from childhood.

How to play Red light, green light

Simple to play and fun to participate in, your team has to line up on one side of a room and move toward a finish line whenever you – the facilitator – shout “green light”. When you yell “red light”, they have to stop.

If they keep moving forward, fall over, or do anything other than stand completely still, then they’re out. The winner is the first person to get to the finish line.

You can also play in separate teams instead of doing it individually though. In this version, you’d split everyone into 2 main groups, with the winner being the first group to get everyone across the finish line.

Top tip: Like many large group energizers, Red Light Green Light works best when you have a bigger space to do it in. Consider going outdoors to a local park if your office can’t accommodate the exercise.

How to play “Hot takes” break

During breaks, encourage people to share unpopular opinions around a certain topic. You start by announcing a subject that is normally non-controversial. Then, let people raise their hands and share a “hot take”, which is an opinion not usually shared by others in general. Here’s an example: the topic is “movie villains”. Someone might raise their hand and say that their hot take is that a certain movie villain is misunderstood and shouldn’t be viewed as bad. Or, maybe the topic is “ice cream”.

A hot take might be someone claiming that chocolate ice cream is the worst flavor. It’s important to keep these topics light and fun so that everyone is comfortable and finds the situation humorous. Now is not the time to bring up politics, religion, or even sports teams if you have a particularly passionate group. You can do a few rounds of this throughout the day whenever you need a pause or refresh.

How to play Six word memoir

This is a common exercise in college English classes, but it involves a lot of creativity and brainpower. Ask people to boil their lives down into six words only. For example, one of the most impactful memoirs we have seen said “The broken bird flies through fog.” This person was sharing - without really disclosing details - that they had overcome some struggles and were proud of their ability to persevere. Give people time to put some real thought into this exercise and it’s sure to be something that stays with them long after the meeting.

How to play Minute to Win It Challenges

Instructions: Set up a series of minute-long challenges where participants must complete a task using everyday objects. Examples include stacking cups or moving cookies from the forehead to the mouth using only facial muscles.

Materials needed: Everyday objects (cups, cookies, etc.).

Prepare for the Minute to Win It Challenges, where lightning-fast antics and friendly rivalry collide. These challenges ignite creativity, force adaptability, and unveil hidden talents as team members scramble to conquer the clock.

A classic getting-to-know-you game, Twenty Questions is fun and easy to play, taking up minimal space and great for after-work activities or as a bar game on a company retreat.

How to play:

‍Split into a team of two or small groups and assign one person who will think of an object, animal, etc. The other team members can ask twenty questions to determine the person's feelings.

Another way to keep score is to time how long it takes for those asking the questions to figure it out. If you ask 20 questions and still don’t know the answer, you lose, and the other person wins. Those who find the solution in less time are the winners and get a higher score.

Materials you’ll need: A list of topics and a timer

How many people: Small to mid-sized teams (8-16 people)

How to play Rolling the dice

You can’t beat this one for simplicity. Have players break into groups of two and provide a set of dice to each pair. The goal is simple: roll the die and try to get the highest total possible in one minute. So, one person should roll and the other can document the number they get. This should go on as many times as they can in one minute. Whoever has the highest number wins.

How to play:

Write down various safety scenarios on slips of paper (e.g., "using a fire extinguisher," "performing CPR") and place them in a hat. Divide employees into teams and have them take turns drawing a slip and acting out the scenario without speaking, while their team guesses what it is.

Safety charades showdown adds a playful twist to learning important safety procedures. It encourages teamwork and creativity while reinforcing vital safety knowledge. Watching coworkers try to mime "emergency exit plan" is always entertaining.

How to play Resource scramble

In this game, teams will have the opportunity to practice some critical thinking and problem solving skills (as well as collaboration). Put people into groups of no more than 8, and give everyone a basket of simple supplies. For example, markers, paper clips, glue, and clay - things you have around the office are fine. Provide each team with a problem and have them use their set of resources to solve it.

Obviously this game works better if the resources could actually be applied to the problem, so you might want to suggest something like “Design a new logo” or “build a prototype of a new seasonal product”. Ideally, the group will come up with a few solutions and decide on their favorite, but they may only produce one if everyone is in agreement and timing is tight.

How to play Cooperative yoga or stretching

A collaborative set of movements is always a nice idea for a group. We suggest focusing on yoga moves and having each person picking the next move in your flow. A participant will pick a yoga move that everyone completes, and then the next person selects a different one, and so on.

It’s best to complete these exercises quietly and without speaking, focusing  instead on breathing and movement.

Explanation:

‍Teams take creative photos that capture the spirit and quirks of the office, like the breakroom plant or that one messy desk. The goal is to create a fun photo journal that showcases the character of the workplace.

For this hybrid setup, in-office workers can snap photos of the office environment—those little things that make the space unique. Meanwhile, remote workers can take photos of their home office setups or capture quirky things around their workspace. All the photos are combined into a digital photo journal that showcases both the in-office and remote workspaces, reflecting everyone’s unique style and creativity. It’s a laid-back way to celebrate both environments and have fun seeing what makes each workspace special.