Don’t underestimate the power of fun: the best games for hybrid teams
In a weeks time I’ll be leaving my job at CAP to begin 6 months of travelling! It’s been a joy for the past 18 months to manage our amazing External Affairs team, and I think one of the best things about our team is that we’ve absolutely cracked online fun and the best games to play as a hybrid team.
Every Wednesday afternoon at 4:30pm we end the day with half an hour of fun. This is a legacy from the COVID-19 lockdowns, when we were all cast into remote working from our spare rooms or kitchen tables, suddenly we needed new ways to stay in touch and keep spirits up. It quickly became a highlight of the week!
We’ve kept it up since, having found it to be an important foundation for our team culture. We are a diverse team split between working remotely, hybrid and in the office, and it helps us stay united and foster a culture where we care about our colleagues as people.
And so as my parting gift, I wanted to share with you the best games we’ve found to play as a hybrid team — because who doesn’t need more fun in their life?
I think it’s only right here to confess that I am a lover of organised fun. I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea — but I have on good authority from my varied team members and others we’ve roped in to join us along the way that even those harder to please enjoy these options!
So without further ado, here’s my recommendations of the three best games to play as a hybrid team:
Codenames is a great board game, and the online version at codenames.game is so well done, it plays just as well as the real life version. You create a room, share the link and everyone joins a team from their own computer, while on a video meeting all together.
It’s a competitive game where your team’s ‘Spymaster’ gives you clues to identify all of your ‘Operatives’ before the other team gets to theirs. But if you uncover ‘Mr X’ by mistake, the game’s over and you lose immediately — like potting the black in pool.
In practice there’s 25 cards laid out with different words — they map to a colour coded grid which only the ‘Spymasters’ can see. Eight or nine will be your team’s (either red or blue), one will be ‘Mr X’ (black) and the rest ‘innocent bystanders’ (beige). The Spymasters take it in turns to give a one word clue and a number of how many cards it links together (e.g. Animals 2). It can’t be a word on the board or directions (e.g. corners), and it has to be carefully chosen to not suggest any of your opponents cards, a bystander or most importantly ‘Mr X’ — which is easier said than done! Your team gets as many guesses as the number you say, but if they guess a card that isn’t yours, your team’s turn immediately ends and passes to the other team without using up the rest of your guesses.
Our competitive team members love code names, but it’s also an easy game to have everyone involved no matter if in person or online and their competitive levels! It’s also great for inter-team competitions as it’s best with at least 6 people (although it can be played with 4). It normally takes 15–20 minutes and is our favourite, we love it.
2. Jigsaws
If we’ve had busy days and are needing to relax, we often do an online jigsaw puzzle together. It’s really nice to just chit chat while focusing on the puzzle, which means there’s no awkward silences or pressure to keep conversation going. We can just enjoy each other’s company.
It’s also really nice to achieve something together, (it gives you a digital round of applause when you complete it!) and there’s opportunity for some light competition to be the one who puts in the last piece if you’re the competitive one.
There’s a few options you can use for this one, but we like Jigsaw Explorer. You can choose the picture you want to do, and the size of puzzle to fit the time you have. Depending on how many people are doing it and what you’ve chosen, this is a quicker option — around 10 minutes to complete.
Pick a picture, click ‘play this puzzle’ and choose multiplayer mode. Enter your nickname and create a game link to share with your team. Hope on a video call and away you go.
3. Pictionary
Finally, a classic. From time to time we mix it up with a gem of online Pictionary from Skribbl. Again, it works well online. Everyone plays from their computer and joins a video meeting, someone creates a ‘private room’ and shares the link.
There’s lots of options to choose how many rounds you play, how many words you’re given to draw and how much time people have to guess. It shows the wrong guess everyone’s made down the right hand side so any typos in the spelling help your opponents which is always annoying!
It works just like in real life, on your turn the website gives you three words to choose from. Your drawing is then shown to the other players as you draw it and they type their guesses in until they get it right or times up. You get points for the number of people and how fast they guess your picture, and people get points for guessing correctly too. The point system is a bit of a black box and the gaps between people are often big!!
This is a fast-paced one, it keeps things moving, everyone’s involved and there’s normally a good few laughs from the varied artistic abilities displayed! It does require good spelling however which means it isn’t always accessible for the whole team. It’s perhaps better for a team that knows each other well and takes some gentle teasing in good spirits. It’s easy to break this one off when you’ve had enough as it counts up scores throughout, so perfect for 30 minutes or less if you need.
There you go — the best games to play with your hybrid team! These are our favourites, but we love a creative idea too. I will confess the most fun we’ve had recently was when we created a CAP bingo sheet (with things that typically happen around the office and some dares) and moved all the teaspoons in the building to the first floor kitchen. The resulting discussion on the CAP intranet was outstanding, with people totally unsuspecting that it was anything other than a strange coincidence!
And when we have the joy of being all together in person, Uno Extreme is our game of choice. The online versions just haven’t cut it because we have an extensive set of bespoke rules which it’s just not the same without! So if you’re a developer and would like to create the most compelling, competitive and cut-throat online Uno game that could possibly exist, get in touch. Our IT team hasn’t taken us up on that unsurprisingly…
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