14 Inspiring Games for Virtual Meeting That Get People Talking

The move to remote working has changed a lot, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the existence of the drab meeting. Our affinity for Zoom withers by the day, and we’re left wondering how to make virtual meetings more fun and provide a better team-building experience for co-workers. Enter, games for virtual meetings.

Our list of 14 virtual team meeting games will bring the joy back to your online meetings, team building activities, conference calls or even to a work Christmas party.

Some of these games use AhaSlides, which lets you create virtual team meeting games for free. Using just their phones, your team can play your quizzes and contribute to your polls, word clouds, brainstorms and spinner wheels.

👊 Protip: Any of these games make a great addition to a virtual party. If you’re planning on throwing one, we’ve got a mega list of 30 totally free virtual party ideas to help make it easier!

Top Games for Virtual Meetings...

• Game #1: Online Pictionary
• Game #2: Spin the Wheel
• Game #3: Whose Photo is This?
• Game #4: Staff Soundbite
• Game #5: Picture Zoom
• Game #6: Balderdash
• Game #7: Build a Storyline
• Game #8: Pop Quiz!
• Game #9: Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament
• Game #10: Household Movie
• Game #11: Most Likely to...
• Game #12: Pointless
• Game #13: Drawful 2
• Game #14: Sheet Hot Masterpiece

Games for Virtual Meeting #1: Online Pictionary

The game that everyone already knows and one that causes fits of laughter at team meetings. Bob from sales, is that the outline of France or a walnut? Let's check out these virtual games to play with coworkers.

Thankfully, you don’t even need a pen and paper to play this classic. We can shine a light on the illustration skills of your whole team using just your web browser.

How to play

1. Choose your online Pictionary platform. Drawsaurus is a popular option, as is skribbl.io. The instructions below apply to both sites:
2. Create a private room. 
3. Copy the invitation link and send it to your teammates.
4. Players take turns drawing a picture using their mouse (or their phone touch screen).
5. At the same time, all the other players try to guess the word that is being drawn.

💡 Check out more ways to play Pictionary on Zoom.

Games for Virtual Meeting #2: Spin the Wheel

What prime-time game show can’t be improved by adding a spinning wheel? Justin Timberlake’s one-season TV wonder, Spin the Wheel, would have been entirely unwatchable without the incredibly ostentatious, 40-foot tall spinning wheel in centre stage.

As it happens, assigning questions monetary value depending on their difficulty, then battling it out for a cool $1 million, can be a thrilling activity for a virtual team meeting.

How to make it

1. Create a spinner wheel on AhaSlides and set different amounts of money as the entries.
2. For each entry, gather several questions. Questions should get harder the more money that an entry is valued at.
3. In your team meeting, spin for each player and give them a question depending on the amount of money they land on.
4. If they get it right, add that amount to their bank.
5. The first to $1 million is the winner!

Take AhaSlides for a Spin.

Productive meetings begin here. Try out our employee engagement software for free!

Games for Virtual Meeting #3: Whose Photo Is This?

This is one of our all-time favourites. This game creates easy conversations, as people love to talk about their own photos and the experiences behind them! 

How to play

1. Before the meeting, ask your Teammates to provide the team leader with a photo they have taken recently (in the last month or in the last year if a month is too restrictive). 
2. For reasons that will become obvious, the photo each person chooses must not show themselves. 
3. In the meeting, the team leader shows the photos in random order. 
4. Everyone guesses who they think the photo belongs to. 
5. When all photos have been shown, the answers are revealed and the players can add up their scores. 

You can also run themed versions of this game, where everyone submits a photo around a common topic. For example:

• Share a photo of your desk (everyone guesses whose desk is pictured).
• Share a photo of your fridge.
• Share a photo of the last holiday you went on.

Games for Virtual Meeting #4: Staff Soundbite

Staff Soundbite is a chance to hear that office sounds you never thought you’d miss, but have been strangely yearning for ever since you started working from home.

Before the activity begins, ask your staff for a few audio impressions of different staff members. If they’ve been working together for a long time, they’ve almost definitely picked up on some of the little innocent traits that their co-workers have.

Play them out during the session and get participants to vote on which co-worker is being impersonated. This virtual team meeting game is a hilarious way to remind everyone that none of the team spirits has been lost since the move online.

How to make it

1. Ask for 1 or 2-sentence impressions of different staff members. Keep it innocent and clean!
2. Put all of those soundbites into type answer quiz slides on AhaSlides and ask ‘who’s this?’ in the heading.
3. Add the correct answer along with any other accepted answers you think your team might propose.
4. Give them a time limit and ensure that faster answers get more points.

Games for Virtual Meeting #5: Picture Zoom

Got a stack of office photos you never thought you’d look at again? Well, rummage through your phone’s photo library, gather them all, and give Picture Zoom a go.

In this one, you present your team with a super zoomed-in image and ask them to guess what the full image is. It’s best to do this with images that have a connection between your employees, like ones from staff parties or ones of office equipment.

Picture Zoom is great for reminding your co-workers that you are still a team with a wonderful shared history, even if it’s based on that ancient office printer that always prints stuff in green.

How to make it

1. Gather a handful of images that connect your co-workers.
2. Create a type answer quiz slide on AhaSlides and add an image.
3. When the option to crop the image appears, zoom in on a part of the image and click save.
4. Write what the correct answer is, with a few other accepted answers as well.
5. Set a time limit and choose whether to grant faster answers and more points.
6. In the quiz leaderboard slide that follows your type answer slide, set the background image as the full-sized image.

Games for Virtual Meeting #6: Balderdash

If you’ve ever played Balderdash, you might remember the ‘weird words’ category. This one gave participants a strange, but totally real word in the English language, and asked them to guess the meaning.

In the remote setting, this is perfect for a bit of light-hearted banter that also gets the creative juices flowing. Your team may not (in fact, probably won’t) know what your word means, but the creative and hilarious ideas that come from asking them are certainly worth a few minutes of your meeting time.

How to make it

1. Find a list of weird words (Use a Random Word Generator and set the word type to 'extended').
2. Choose one word and announce it to your group.
3. Everyone anonymously submits their own definition of the word to a brainstorming slide.
4. Add the real definition anonymously from your phone.
5. Everyone votes for the definition they think is real.
6. 1 point goes to everyone who voted for the right answer.
7. 1 point goes to whoever gets a vote on their submission, for each vote they get.

Games for Virtual Meeting #7: Build a Storyline

Don’t let a global pandemic quash that bizarre, creative spirit in your team. Build a Storyline works perfectly to keep that artistic, weird energy of the workplace alive.

Start by suggesting the beginning sentence of a story. One by one, your team will add their own short additions before passing the role onto the next person. By the end, you’ll have a full story that’s imaginative and hilarious.

This is a virtual team meeting game that requires very little effort and runs behind the scenes throughout the meeting. If you’ve got a smaller team, you can loop back around and get everyone to submit another sentence.

How to make it

1. Create an open-ended slide on AhaSlides and put the title as the beginning of your story.
2. Add the ‘name’ box under ‘additional fields’ so you can keep track of who’s answered
3. Add the ‘team’ box and replace the text with ‘who’s next?’, so that each writer can write the name of the next.
4. Make sure the results are unhidden and presented in a grid, so the writers can see the story in a line before they add their part.
5. Tell your team to put something on their head during the meeting while they’re writing their part. That way, you can rightly excuse anyone gazing down at their phone and laughing.

Games for Virtual Meeting #8: Pop Quiz!

Seriously, what meeting, workshop, company retreat or break time hasn’t been improved by a live quiz?

The level of competition they inspire and the hilarity that often ensues puts them squarely on the throne of engaging in virtual team meeting games.

Now, in the age of the digital workplace, short-bust quizzes have proven to encourage much of the team spirit and drive to succeed that has been lacking during this office-to-home transition period.

How to use them

1. Click the template above to sign up for free.
2. Choose the quiz you want from the template library.
3. Press 'Clear responses' to erase the sample answers.
4. Share the unique join code with your players.
5. Players join on their phones, and you present the quiz to them live!

Games for Virtual Meeting #9: Rock Paper Scissors Tournament

Need something at a moment's notice? No preparation is required for this classic game. All your players need to do is turn on their cameras, raise their hands, and put on their game faces. 

How to play

1. The most important aspect is whether players reveal their choice “on three” or “after three”. Some of us were raised on the idea that you say the name of the game and reveal it on or after the word “scissors”. A mismatch of rules in the group could cause angst and debate, so get this straight before play starts!
2. Oh, you don’t really need further rules for Rock Paper Scissors, do you?

Games for Virtual Meeting #10: Household Movie

Always thought that the way you stacked your stationery looked a little bit like Jack and Rose floating on a Titanic door. Well, yeah, that’s totally mad, but in Household Movie, it’s also a winning entry!

This is one of the best virtual team meeting games for testing the artistic eye of your staff. It challenges them to find items around their house and put them together in a way that recreates a scene from a movie.

For this, you can either let them choose the movie or give them one from the IMDb top 100. Give them 10 minutes, and once they’re done, get them to present them one by one and collect everyone’s votes on whose is their favourite.

How to make it

1. Assign movies to each of your team members or allow free range (as long as they have a picture of the real scene, too).
2. Give them 10 minutes to find whatever they can around their house that can recreate a famous scene from that movie.
3. While they’re doing this, create a multiple-choice slide on AhaSlides with the names of the movie titles.
4. Click ‘allow picking more than one option’ so that participants can name their top 3 recreations.
5. Hide the results until they’re all in and reveal them at the end.

Game #11: Most Likely to...

If you never got one of those fake awards in high school for being the person with the highest probability of doing something that ended up being a woeful misjudgment, now’s your chance!

You know your team better than anyone. You know who’s most likely to get arrested on a booze-filled holiday or most likely to submit an unwitting audience to an off-key rendition of Knowing Me, Knowing You.

In terms of virtual team meeting games with the best effort to hilarity ratio, Most Likely to… knocks them out of the park. Simply name some ‘most likely’ scenarios, list out your participants’ names and get them to vote on who’s most likely.

How to make it

1. Make a bunch of multiple-choice slides with ‘most likely to…’ as the title.
2. Choose to ‘add a longer description’ and type in the rest of the ‘most likely’ scenario on each slide.
3. Write the names of the participants in the ‘options’ box.
4. Untick the ‘this question has correct answer(s)’ box.
5. Present the results in a bar chart.
6. Choose to hide the results and reveal them at the end.

Game #12: Pointless

If you’re unaware of the British game show Pointless, let me fill you in. It’s based on the idea that more obscure answers to broad questions get more points, which is something you can recreate with AhaSlides.

In Pointless, the virtual team meeting games edition, you pose a question to your group and get them to put forward 3 answers. The answer or answers that are mentioned the least bring in the points.

For example, asking for ‘countries starting with B’ might bring you a bunch of Brazils and Belgians, but it’s the Benins and Brunei's that will bring home the bacon.

How to make it

1. Create a word cloud slide with AhaSlides and put the broad question as the title.
2. Up the ‘entries per participant’ to 3 (or anything more than 1).
3. Put a time limit on answering each question.
4. Hide the results and reveal them at the end.
5. The most-mentioned answer will loom the largest in the cloud and the least mentioned (the one that gets the points) will be the smallest.

Game #13: Drawful 2

We’ve mentioned the wonders of Drawful 2 before, but if you’re new to the software, it’s the best out there for some seriously out-the-box doodling.

Drawful 2 challenges players to draw pretty far-out concepts using nothing but their phone, a finger and two colours. Then, players see each of the drawings in turn and guess what they’re supposed to be.

Naturally, the quality of the pictures isn’t the highest, but the results are truly hysterical. It’s a great ice breaker for sure, but it’s also a virtual team meeting game that your staff will be begging to play again and again.

How to play it

1. Purchase and download Drawful 2 (it’s cheap!)
2. Open it up, start a new game and share your screen.
3. Invite your team to join on their phones via a room code.
4. The rest is explained in the game. Have fun!

Game #14: Sheet Hot Masterpiece

Workplace artists, rejoice! It’s your chance to create stunning artwork using nothing but the free tools on your computer. Except, by ‘stunning artwork’, we mean crudely drawn pixel replicas of beautiful masterpieces.

Sheet Hot Masterpiece uses Google Sheets to recreate classic pieces of art with blocks of colour. The results are, naturally, way off from the originals, but they're always absolutely hilarious.

Of all our virtual team meeting games, this one probably requires the most effort on your part. You have to engage in some conditional formatting on Google Sheets and create a colour pixel map for each piece of artwork you want your team to recreate. Still, it’s totally worth it in our opinion.

Thanks to teambuilding.com for this idea!

How to make it

1. Create a Google Sheet.
2. Press CTRL + A to select all cells.
3. Drag the lines of the cells to make them all square.
4. Click on Format and then Conditional Formatting (with all cells still selected).
5. Under ‘Format rules’ select ‘Text is exactly’ and input the value of 1.
6. Under ‘Formatting style’ choose the ‘fill colour’ and the ‘text colour’ as a colour from the artwork being recreated.
7. Repeat this process with all the other colours of the artwork (entering 2, 3, 4, etc. as the value for each new colour).
8. Add a colour key on the left so that participants know what number values evoke what colours.
9. Repeat the entire process for a few different artworks (make sure the artworks are simple so that this doesn’t take forever).
10. Insert an image of each artwork into each sheet that you’re making, so that your participants have a reference to draw from.
11. Make a simple multiple-choice slide on AhaSlides so that everyone can vote for their favourite 3 recreations.

When to Use Virtual Team Meeting Games

It’s totally understandable that you don’t want to waste your meeting time – we’re not disputing that. But, you have to remember that this meeting is often the only time in the day that your employees will properly talk with each other.

With that in mind, we advise using one virtual team meeting game in every meeting. Most of the time, games don’t go beyond 5 minutes, and the benefits they bring far outweigh any time you may consider “wasted”.

But when to use team building activities in a meeting? There are a few schools of thought on this…

• At the beginning – These kinds of games are traditionally used to break the ice and get brains in a creative, open state before the meeting.
• In the middle – A game to break up the heavy business flow of a meeting will usually be most welcome by the team.
• At the end – A recap game works great for checking to understand and ensuring everyone’s on the same page before they go back to their remote work.

💡 Want more? Check out our article and survey (with 2,000+ surveyees) about remote work and online meeting behaviours.

The State of Virtual Team Meetings

Remote work can feel isolating for your team members. Virtual team meeting games help to lessen that feeling by bringing colleagues together online.

Let us paint the digital landscape, here:

A study from UpWork found that 73% of companies in 2028 will be at least partly remote.

Another study from GetAbstract found that 43% of U.S. workers want an increase in remote work after experiencing it during the COVID-19 pandemic. That's almost half of the country's workforce that now wants to work at least partially from home.

All the numbers really point to one thing: more and more online meetings in the future.

Virtual team meeting games are your way to keep the connection between your employees in an ever-fragmenting work environment.