112- 12 Awesome Team Building Games Your Team Won't Hate

17 April 2023

 
1. Game of Possibilities
Time: 5-6 minutes
Number of Participants: One or multiple small groups
Tools Needed: Any random objects
Rules: This is an excellent team-building exercise that can be completed in just five minutes. Assign an object to one person in each group and have them demonstrate a unique use for it in front of their teammates. The rest of the group must then try to guess what the demonstration is about. The person demonstrating cannot use words, and their ideas should be creative and possibly unusual.

Objective: This team building exercise inspires creativity and individual innovation.
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2. Winner/Loser
Time: 5-6 minutes
Number of Participants: Two or more people
Tools Needed: None
Rules: Partner A shares a genuine negative experience from their personal or professional life with Partner B. Next, Partner A revisits the same experience, but this time, they focus solely on the positive aspects of it. Partner B assists in exploring the bright side of the unpleasant situation. Then, they switch roles, and Partner B gets a chance to share and explore their positive perspective.

Objective: Participants discover how to reframe negative situations into learning experiences together. 

3. Purpose Mingle
Time: 1 - 2 minutes
Number of Participants: Any
Tools Needed: None
Rules: Here is a suggestion for a quick and effective indoor team building activity. Prior to a meeting, ask every participant to walk around and communicate to as many people as possible about what they intend to contribute to the upcoming meeting. To make it more interesting, you could offer a prize for the person who shares their contribution with the most people, and another prize for the person who effectively delivers on their promise during the meeting.
 
Objective: This approach enhances meeting productivity by encouraging attendees to consider how they can contribute instead of solely focusing on what they want to gain from the meeting.
 

Outdoor Team Building Game

 
4. Scavenger Hunt
Time: > 1 hour
Number of Participants: Two or more small groups
Tools Needed: Pen and Paper
Rules: Divide the group into pairs or groups of more than two individuals. Generate a set of silly assignments for each team to complete together, such as taking a picture with a stranger or photographing a building/object in the office. Distribute the task list and a deadline for completion to each team. The winning team is the one that completes the most tasks in the shortest amount of time. You can even assign points to each task based on its level of difficulty to create a point system.
 
Objective:  This is an excellent team building activity that promotes collaboration among individuals from different teams, departments, or social circles, thereby breaking down office cliques. It can be a fun and engaging scavenger hunt where teams complete various tasks on a list within a given timeframe. Interestingly, we organized our own scavenger hunt using our tool to monitor and manage the tasks.

5. Human Knot
Time: 15 - 30 minutes
Number of Participants: 8 - 20 people
Tools Needed: None
Rules: Arrange everyone in a circle, standing shoulder to shoulder and facing one another. Ask each person to extend their right hand and grab a random hand of someone across from them. Next, tell them to extend their left hand and grasp the hand of another person across the circle. Set a time limit for the group to untangle the knot of arms without releasing their hands. If the group is too large, form several smaller circles and have them compete against one another.
 
Objective: This team building game depends heavily on effective communication and teamwork. Additionally, it generates a lot of interesting and entertaining stories that can be shared during water cooler chats in the workplace.
 

6. The Perfect Square
Time: 15 - 30 minutes
Number of Participants: 5 - 20 people
Tools Needed: Long piece of rope tied together and a blindfold for each person
Rules: Gather your colleagues and form a circle while holding a section of a rope. Then, ask everyone to put on a blindfold and place the rope on the ground. After taking a few steps back from the circle, instruct everyone to return and attempt to create a square shape with the rope while still blindfolded. To make it more challenging, set a time limit to create a competitive atmosphere. You can also designate some team members to remain silent to make it even more difficult.
 
Objective: This game emphasizes the importance of effective communication and leadership skills. By asking some team members to remain silent, the game also fosters a sense of trust among the team, enabling members to guide one another in the correct direction
 

7. The Mine Field
Time: 15 - 30 minutes
Number of Participants: 4 - 10 people (even numbers)
Tools Needed: Various handheld objects, several blindfolds
Rules: To play this game, you'll need an open space such as an empty parking lot or a park, and a collection of objects like cones, balls, or bottles placed randomly across the space. Pair up the players and ask one person from each pair to put on a blindfold while the other person provides verbal instructions to guide them from one side of the open space to the other without stepping on any of the objects. The blindfolded person cannot speak. To increase the difficulty level, you can create specific routes that the blindfolded players must follow.
 
Objective: This game emphasizes the importance of trust, communication, and active listening skills. It can also be an enjoyable team building activity to play at the beach.
 

8. The Egg Drop
Time: 1 - 2 hours
Number of Participants: Two or more small groups
Tools Needed: Assorted office supplies
Rules: Divide the participants into teams of three to five individuals and provide each group with an uncooked egg. Gather a pile of office supplies and give the teams 15 to 30 minutes to create a contraption around the egg using the supplies provided. The goal is to design a contraption that will prevent the egg from breaking when dropped. Suggested supplies include tape, pencils, straws, plastic utensils, packing material, newspapers, and rubber bands. Once the time is up, drop each egg contraption from the second or third floor of your building and see which eggs survive the challenge. This activity is known as Egg Drop Challenge and is an excellent way to promote creativity, problem-solving, and teamwork.
 
Objective: This timeless team building activity is a fun and interactive exercise that involves collaboration and critical thinking to bring team members closer together. It can get quite messy, so be prepared with extra eggs in case some break during the process. This activity works best with larger groups and can be an "eggcellent" addition to any corporate team building event.
 

Ice Breaker Games

9. The Barter Puzzle
Time: 1 - 2 hours
Number of Participants: Four or more small groups
Tools Needed: Different jigsaw puzzles for each group
Rules: Divide participants into small teams of equal size, and give each team a jigsaw puzzle of the same difficulty level. The aim is to finish the puzzle as quickly as possible. However, there's a twist - some of the pieces have been mixed up with other teams' puzzles. To successfully complete the puzzle, teams must come up with a plan to retrieve the missing pieces, which may involve negotiating, trading, exchanging team members, or other tactics. The teams must make decisions together as a group to successfully complete the challenge.
 
Objective: This game emphasizes the importance of problem-solving and leadership abilities. It challenges team members to negotiate, trade, and collaborate to achieve a common goal. While some individuals may take the lead, it's crucial for the team to work together and reach a consensus before making any decisions.
 

10. Truth and Lies
Time: 10 - 15 minutes
Number of Participants: Five or more people
Tools Needed: None
Rules: . In this game, the team members sit in a circle and take turns sharing three truthful facts about themselves and one false fact. The false fact should be believable rather than ridiculous. After each person shares, the rest of the group tries to guess which fact is the false one. This game encourages active listening, attention to detail, and intuition.

Objective: This activity is an effective way to break the ice and build rapport among team members, especially for those who are new to the team. It promotes open-mindedness and reduces biases or stereotypes that may exist among colleagues. Additionally, it allows for quieter team members to feel more comfortable sharing some interesting facts about themselves.
 

11. Blind Drawing
Time: 10 - 15 minutes
Number of Participants: Two or more people
Tools Needed: A picture, pen, and paper
Rules: Divide the participants into pairs, and have them sit with their backs facing each other. Give one person a pen and paper, and the other person a picture. The person with the picture should describe it to their partner without actually telling them what it is. For instance, if the picture is of a worm in an apple, they should not say "draw an apple with a worm in it." The partner with the pen and paper should draw what they think the picture represents based on the verbal description. You can set a time limit of 10-15 minutes for this game.
 
Objective: This exercise highlights the importance of effective communication and interpretation. It is fascinating to see how the person drawing interprets the verbal description given by their partner.
 

12. This is Better Than That
Time: 15 - 20 minutes
Number of Participants: Any
Tools Needed: Four or more objects
Rules: 
Split the participants into teams of equal size and select four or more different objects, or objects that look different. Then, provide a scenario for each team to solve a problem using only those selected objects. The scenario can range from being stranded on a desert island to saving the world from a Godzilla attack. The teams are required to rank the objects based on their usefulness in the given scenario, and explain their reasoning behind each object's ranking.
 
Objective: The objective of this exercise is to promote creative problem solving within the team. It is important to create challenging scenarios to avoid making it obvious which objects are most useful.

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