Are you looking for free ice breaker games? We've all been here - fidgeting around in a room full of strangers wondering if withstanding this awkward silence or wiping bird poop on your car is better.
But have no fear, we will give you a huge pickaxe to smash this icy-cold air into little frosty bits, and these 21 icebreaker games are precisely what you need.
| Most Popular Icebreaker Games | Two Truths and A Lie |
| Do I have to drink during icebreaker games? | No, you don't, there are lots of options |
| What are the 4 C’s icebreakers? | Name a cartoon character, a colour, a car, and a cuisine |
Tips for Better Engagement
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Check out Fun Presentation Icebreaker Games...
- #1: Spin the Wheel
- #2: Mood GIFs
- #3: Hello, from...
- #4: Paying Attention?
- #5: Embarrassing Story
- #6: Desert Island Inventory
- #7: Pop Quiz!
- #8: You Nailed It!
- #9: Pitch a Movie
- #10: Grill the Gaffer
- #11: The One-Word Icebreaker
- #12: Zoom's Draw Battle
- #13: Who is the Liar
- #14: Rock Paper Scissors Hammer Helmet
- #15: A Great Wind Blows Chair Game
- #16: Never Have I Ever
- #17: Table Topics
- #18: Name that Tune
- #19: Simon Says...
- #20: Trivia Game Showdown
- #21: Telephone
- Key Takeaways
- Frequently Asked Questions
Top 20 Fun Icebreaker Games for Adults
Looking to introduce your team to each other or reconnect with old colleagues? These icebreaker games for adults are just what you need! Plus, they're perfect for offline, hybrid and online workplaces.
Ice Breaker #1: Spin the Wheel
As a facilitator for a virtual meeting, sometimes you just want easy fun icebreaker games that take the responsibility for leading out of your hands. Well, with a bit of preparation, Spin the Wheel can be the perfect solution. So, let's try the AhaSlides Spinner Wheel.
Create a bunch of activities or questions for your team and assign them to a spinning wheel. Simply spin the wheel for each team member and get them to perform the action or answer the question that the wheel lands on.
If you're pretty confident that you know your team, you can go with some reasonably hardcore dares. But we recommend some chill truths related to personal life and work that all of your team are comfortable with.
Doing it properly creates engagement through suspense and a fun environment through the activities you create.
How to make it
As is the theme of this list of meeting fun icebreaker games, you might have already guessed that there's a free platform for this.
AhaSlides lets you create up to 10,000 entries on a colourful spinning wheel. Think of that enormous wheel on Wheel of Fortune, but one with more options that don't take a decade to finish a spin.
Start by filling in the entries of the wheel with your activities or questions (or even get participants to write their names in). Then, when it's meeting time, share your screen on Zoom, call on one of your team members and spin the wheel for them.
Take AhaSlides for a Spin!
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Ice Breaker #2: Mood GIFs
This is a quick, fun and visual activity to start with. Give your participants a selection of funny images or GIFs and get them to vote on which one most accurately describes what they're feeling right now.
Once they've decided if they're feeling more like Arnold Schwarzenegger sipping tea or a collapsed pavlova, they can see the results of their voting in a chart.
This helps to relax your team and eradicate some of the serious, stifling nature of the meeting. Not only that, but it gives you, the facilitator, a chance to gauge the general engagement levels before the juicy brain work starts.
How to make it
You can easily make this kind of icebreaker game for meetings via the image choice slide type on AhaSlides. Simply fill out 3 - 10 image options, either by uploading them from your computer or choosing from the integrated image and GIF libraries. In the settings, untick the box labelled 'this question has the correct answer(s)' and you're good to go.
Ice Breaker #3: Hello, From...
Another simple one here. Hello, from.... Let everyone have their say about their hometown or where they live.
Doing this gives everyone a bit of background knowledge about their co-workers and gives them a chance to connect through common geography ("You're from Glasgow? I was recently mugged there!"). It's great for injecting a sense of instant togetherness into your meeting.
How to make it
On AhaSlides, you can choose a word cloud slide type for fun icebreaker games. After you propose the question, participants will put forward their answers on their devices. The size of the answer shown in the word cloud depends on how many people wrote that answer, giving your team a better sense of where everyone's coming from.
Ice Breaker #4: Paying Attention?
There's a great way to inject a bit of humour and get some useful information from your colleagues - asking what they're going to do to engage in the meeting.
This question is open-ended, so it gives participants a chance to write whatever they want. Answers can be funny, practical or just plain weird, but they all allow new co-workers to get to know each other better.
If freshman nerves are still running high at your company, you can opt to make this question anonymous. That means that your team have free range to write whatever they want, without the fear of judgement for their input.
How to make it
This one's a job for the open-ended slide type. With this, you can pose the question, then choose whether or not to have participants reveal their names and choose an avatar. Select to hide the answers until they're all in, then choose to reveal them in one large grid or one by one.
There's also the option of setting a time limit on this one and just asking for as many answers as your team can think of within 1 minute.
💡 You can find many of these activities in the AhaSlides template library. Click below to host each of these from your laptop while your audience responds with their phones!
Ice Breaker #5: Share an Embarrassing Story
Now here's one you'll definitely want to make anonymous!
Sharing an embarrassing story is a hilarious approach to removing the rigidity of your meeting. Not only that, but co-workers who have just shared something embarrassing with the group are more likely to open up and give out their best ideas later in the session. One study found that this icebreaker activity for face-to-face meetings can generate 26% more and better ideas.
How to make it
Another one for the open-ended slide here. Just ask the question in the title, remove the 'name' field for participants, hide the results, and reveal them one by one.
These slides have an answer maximum of 500 characters, so you can be sure that the activity won't run on forever because Janice from marketing has lived a life of regret.
Ice Breaker #6: Desert Island Inventory
We've all wondered what would happen if we'd get stranded on a desert island. Personally, if I could go 3 minutes without searching for a volleyball to paint a face on, I'd basically consider myself Bear Grylls.
In this one, you can ask each member of the team what they would take to a desert island. Afterwards, everyone anonymously votes for their favourite answer.
Answers usually range from genuinely practical to entirely ludicrous, but all of them show brains igniting before the main event of your meeting kicks off.
How to make it
Create a brainstorming slide with your question at the top. When you're presenting, you take the slide through 3 stages:
- Submission - Everyone submits one (or multiple if you wish) answers to your question.
- Voting - Everyone votes for a handful of answers they like.
- Result - You reveal the one with the most votes!
Ice Breaker #7: Pop Quiz!
How about a quick bit of trivia to get those neurons firing before your meeting? A live quiz is possibly the best way to get all of your participants engaged and laughing in a way that the 40th meeting this month simply can't on its own.
Not only that, but it's a great leveller for your participants. The quiet mouse and the loudmouth both have an equal say in a quiz and may even be working together on the same team.
How to make it
We've seen some truly brilliant quizzes come out of AhaSlides.
Choose from any of the 6 types of quiz slides (pick answers, pick images, type answers, match pairs, spinner wheel and correct order) to create any type of quiz for a team with diverse interests. An image quiz may be great for geography lovers, while a sound quiz would definitely appeal to music nuts.
Ice-Smashing Free Quiz Templates!
Save heaps of time with free quiz templates. Click an image below and sign up for free with AhaSlides. Or, check out AhaSlides Public Template Library
Ice Breaker #8: You Nailed It!
If you prefer to step away from competition and opt for something altogether more wholesome, try You Nailed It!
This is a simple activity in which your team gives praise to a team member who has been crushing it recently. They don't have to get into the specifics of what that person has been doing so well, they just have to mention them by name.
This can be a huge boost of confidence for those mentioned team members. Also, it gives them an elevated appreciation for the team that recognises their good work.
How to make it
When you're after quick-fire
fun icebreaker games for a virtual, hybrid and offline meeting, a word cloud slide is a way to go. Simply ask and hide the answers to stop people from jumping on the bandwagon. Once the answers are in, a few team members' names will stand out amongst the crowd on the results page.If you want to be more inclusive of the team's efforts, you can up the number of answers that each member gives. Upping the requirement to 5 answer entries means that members can mention who's nailed it from each company department.
Ice Breaker #9: Pitch a Movie
Everyone's got some weird movie idea that they've held onto in case they match with film execs on Tinder. Everyone, right?
Well, if not, Pitch a Movie is their chance to come up with one and try and secure funding for it.
This activity gives each of your team members 5 minutes to develop an outlandish movie idea. When called upon, they'll pitch their ideas one by one to the group, who afterwards will vote on which one deserves funding.
Pitch a Movie gives total creative freedom to your team and confidence in presenting ideas, which can be invaluable for the following meeting.
How to make it
As your team is rattling off their wild film ideas, you can fill in a multiple-choice slide with their film titles as the options.
Present the voting results as a percentage of total answers in a bar, doughnut or pie chart format. Make sure to hide the results and limit participants to one choice only.
Ice Breaker #10: Grill the Gaffer
If you're staring at this title perplexed, allow us to elaborate:
- Grill: To question someone intensely.
- Gaffer: The boss.
In the end, the title is about as simple as the activity. It's similar to a reverse version of sharing an embarrassing story, but with more self-inflicted scrutiny.
Essentially you, as the facilitator, are in the hot seat for this one. Your team can ask you anything they want, either anonymously or not, and you have to answer some uncomfortable truths.
This is one of the best levellers in
fun icebreaker games. As the facilitator or boss, you may not fully realise how nervous your team is about answering your questions. Grill the Gaffer gives them control, gives them creative freedom and helps them to see you as a human with whom they can talk.How to make it
AhaSlides' Q&A slide is perfect for this one. Just encourage your team to type in any question they want before you answer them over the video call.
Questions can be submitted by anyone in the audience and there's no limit to how many they can ask. You can also turn on the 'anonymous questions' feature to allow your team full creativity and freedom.
Ice Breaker #11: The One-Word Icebreaker
Always appearing on the
fun icebreaker games idea list, the One-Word Challenge is easy to play in any kind of venue. Simply ask one question and the participant has to answer immediately. The interesting point in this game is based on the time limit for answering, mostly in 5 seconds.There won't be much time for them to think, so people absolutely say the first thought that comes up in their minds. Another way of playing this game is to list out something that belongs to the chosen topic in turn in 5 seconds. If you cannot speak out the right answer within the required time, you are a loser. You can set 5 rounds, find out the last loser, and put a fun punishment.
For example:
- Describe the leader in your team in one word.
- Name one kind of flower.
Ice Breaker #12: Zoom's Draw Battle
Alright folks, raise your hand if Zoom was your BFF even before the big C! For the rest of you Zoom newbies, don't worry - we'll have you video chatting like pros with this icebreaker game!
Now that meetings are in the cloud, the Whiteboard feature is our new favourite way for Zoom's Draw Battle. You know what they say - two heads draw better than one! Our last drawing challenge was hysterical.
The task? Draw a silly cat scarfing down an apple like a hungry beast. But the kitty twist was each of us got assigned a different body part. Let me tell you, try guessing what a leg and two eyes make - it's purr-fectly absurd!
Ice Breaker #13: Who is the Liar?
Who is the liar? has many different versions around the world, such as Two Truths and a Lie or a Super Detective, Find out... The version we want to tell is very exciting and exciting. Among a group of players, there is one person who is a liar and the mission of the players is to find out who they are.
How to make it
In this game, if there are six participants, only give a topic for five people. This way, one person won't know about the topic.
Each player must describe the topic but cannot be straightforward too soon. The liar also has to speak something related when it's their turn. After each round, players vote on who they think is the liar and fire them out.
The game continues if this person is not the real liar and vice versa. If there are only two players left and one of them is the liar, the liar wins.
Ice Breaker #14: Rock Paper Scissors Hammer Helmet
Time to get these brain cells firing before we dive into the deep end of the meeting pool, and here we have the perfect palate cleanser for you - rock, paper, scissors with a twist!
How to make it
This classic face-off is about more than just chance, is also about wit and who's faster.
Prepare a plastic hammer and a sturdy helmet to cover heads (if you don't have them, just use hands to Karate-chop your opponent).
Two people will stand against each other and play rock-paper-scissors - if one wins they must immediately grab the hammer and pop their opponent, while the loser must use the helmet to defend.
Ice Breaker #15: A Great Wind Blows Chair Game
Also known as the Big Wind Blows, A Great Wind Blows Chair Game is a joyful and interactive game idea for kids and adults. In order to start, first arrange all the chairs to form a circle (all chairs facing inward toward the middle).
Leader says ‘The cold wind blows for.......’ Anyone that’s related to the cold wind blows will then move to a new seat. Any player who is affected must stand up and find another chair that is at least 2 chairs away from their own. It is a super perfect warm-up game for training and meeting sessions.
Ice Breaker #16: Never Have I Ever
Never Have I Ever... is a transformed kind of traditional Spin the Bottle Game. This juicy party classic is perfect for a real-life or Zoom game. The first participant begins by saying a simple statement about an experience they have never done before starting with "Never have I ever".
Anyone who at some point in their life has never had the experience that the first player says must put a thump down.
We often play this at AhaSlides because it's a really effective team-building icebreaker. It led to various hilarious moments such as when a colleague of mine said 'Never have I ever had a girlfriend'😔 and won the game since everyone except him had a partner...
Ice Breaker #17: Table Topics
One of the printable fun icebreaker games, Table Topics is a good choice to get the meeting, training or workshop started. Not simply an entertaining game, it requires a bit of wit since players have to come up with a response within a time limit.
How to make it
AhaSlides' spinner wheel can help you generate and randomise the questions. Whoever landed one of those questions will have to answer in a timely manner. The questions should range from easy-peasy to straight-up crazy👇
- If you time-travelled naked 100 years in the past, how would you prove that you were from the future?
- What are your 3 favourite personality traits?
Ice Breaker #18: Name That Tune
Any team bonding needs some music to cheer up the atmosphere. Take time to prepare the Name that Tune challenge to have fun with your team. Play a short part of the song or the soundtrack and the players have to respond as fast as possible. You can prepare a list of songs based on occasions, like Christmas and New Year songs at a Year-End party, or specific songs for kids.
How to make it
You don't need to prepare anything but an AhaSlides account because we have a ready-made Name the Tune quiz for you! Simply click this button👇Each quiz question will play a tune that you need to guess. The final winners get chicken dinners!
Ice Breaker #19: Simon Says...
Simon Says is a classic icebreaker game that engages adults and kids in simple physical teamwork. We assume you've probably played this game already, but still, this is a quick guide for any clueless face out there who's still wondering what Simon's gonna say...
How to make it
Designate a 'Simon' to start. This person will lead actions and be sure to say 'Simon says' before each movement. Have all players watch and listen to instructions. They have to do what Simon says or get eliminated. In the end, you might discover a new thing or two about your colleagues, such as being able to move their ears.
Ice Breaker #20: Trivia Game Showdown
An appealing thing about Trivia Game Showdown is that there are a dozen topics to explore, ranging from History to Movie themes. Here are our tips for using these ice breaker games effectively:
How to make it
Create an AhaSlides account, and grab a few templates from our diverse Template Library. Present the quiz weekly before the meeting starts, and watch interactions skyrocket when everyone's in their competitive mode.
💡Protip: Use the Trivia game to introduce yourself to the team as a new employee. AhaSlides has a plethora of interactive activities like polling and Q&A to debunk the ice in the first few days of work and make you feel at home 🛋
Ice Breaker #21: Telephone
For many icebreaker activities, people like to play the Telephone game. Team members line up and whisper and pass the phrase from one person to another. The last person has to speak out the answer, the more it is accurate, the more points your team will get. You can prepare some hard phrases like a tongue twister to make the challenge a bit quirky. For example:
- Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
- You know New York, you need New York, you know you need unique New York.
Why Use Fun Icebreaker Games For Meetings?
There was once a time when in-person ice breakers were simply deemed 'a fun way to start a meeting'. They'd typically last about 2 minutes before the meeting was ushered onto 58 minutes of cold, hard business.
Warm-up activities such as these have taken on far more prominence as research continues to come out about their benefits. And when meetings moved online in 2020 to hybrid/offline in a flash, the importance of icebreaker games became even clearer.
Let's take a look at a few...
5 Benefits of Fun Icebreaker Games
- Better engagement - The most well-known benefit of any icebreaker games is to help your participants relax before the real meat of the session begins. Encouraging everyone to participate at the start of the meeting sets a precedent for the rest of it. This is crucial in a meeting where it’s super easy to tune out.
- Better idea sharing - Not only are your participants more engaged, but they’re more likely to give their best ideas. A big reason why your employees aren’t sharing their best ideas during in-person meetings is that they’re wary of judgment. An online platform that allows participant anonymity and works in conjunction with online video conferencing apps can coax the best out of everyone.
- Levelling the playing field - Icebreaker games in meetings give everyone a say. They help to break down the boundaries between different job titles, or in today’s global environment, different cultures. They allow even your quietest wallflowers to put forward great ideas that will spur engagement for the rest of the meeting.
- Encouraging teamwork from afar - There’s nothing better to stimulate your disconnected team online than a Zoom meeting icebreaker. You can do this through team-based quizzes, activities, ice breakers for presentations, or open-ended questions, all of which get your staff back to working together.
- Giving you a better idea of your team - Some people are more adapted to working from home than others – that’s a fact. Zoom fun icebreaker games and questions for work give you a chance to gauge the mood in the room and connect the in-office members with the online ones.
When to Use Fun Icebreaker Games For Meetings
There are a few scenarios where meeting icebreaker games can reap some of the benefits we just mentioned.
- At the start of every meeting - The activities of the meeting’s first 5 minutes are just too beneficial not to have every single time your team gets together.
- With a new team - If your team are all going to be working together for a while, you need to smash that ice as quickly and effectively as possible.
- After a company merger - A steady supply of ice breakers throughout your get-togethers helps to remove suspicion about ‘the other team’ and get everyone on the same page.
- As a closer - Having a fun icebreaker at the end of a meeting cuts through the business-heavy atmosphere of the previous 55 minutes and gives your staff a reason to sign off feeling positive.
Key Takeaways
There are many ways to make Fun Icebreaker Games for adults. But, do you know what the best icebreaker is? The bad news is, there is no such the best icebreaker idea. But the good news is, you can use AhaSlides to get more ideas for games to play over Zoom, which is 100% free to create a suitable challenge for all your team can play and make connections. The ideal ice breaker is the game can strengthen bonding, stimulate better brainstorming, and create an inclusivity atmosphere.
With our simple icebreaker games both online and offline, you can definitely improve engagement and synergy between co-workers, classmates, and teammates.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are icebreaker games?
Icebreaker games are lighthearted activities used to help people relax, start conversations, and get to know each other better in a low-pressure way, especially at the beginning of a meeting, training, or social gathering.
What is the 5-minute icebreaker activity?
There's an easy icebreaker activity that you can do in 5 minutes in a group. Here are the steps:
1. Partner up - Have participants count off and pair up with the person who has the same number.
2. Introductions - Each person takes 1 minute to introduce themselves to their partner. They share their name, role/background, and an interesting fact about themselves.
3. Questions - Provide a list of 5-6 lighthearted get-to-know-you questions for partners to ask each other. Sample questions include favourite hobby, dream vacation spot, favourite comfort food, and such.
4. Share with the group - One partner introduces their pair to the whole group by sharing their name and one fun fact learned. Then switch so the other partner can do the same.
5. Mix it up - Have everyone find a new partner and repeat the 1-minute introductions. Make sure to mingle with different people each time.
6. Compliment their partner - After a few rounds, have partners share one nice thing they enjoyed learning about each other.
What are 3 fun ice breaker questions?
1. What’s your superpower and why?
2. What's a weird talent or odd fact about yourself?
3. What's your favourite comfort food and what emotion does it match?
