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Ask HN: Team fun event ideas during WFH?

216 points by pseudobry ↗ HN
Can y'all share any team fun event ideas that have worked well for you during the WFH/pandemic period? My folks miss the natural in-person interactions that occur in the office, and we could use some time together to decompress. But, how do we do that remotely? Maybe you long-time remote teams are already experts at this? Is there an "awesome-remote-team-fun-events" GitHub repo?

Any ideas are welcome, but I'm particular interested in events with $0-$100 per person budget and work with team size of 5-20 people. Thanks.

Edit: This is something we'd do during work hours.

272 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 362 ms ] thread
decafninja
Gaming is always an option, but that assumes your entire team consists of gamers or at least willing to try.
gigatexal
Two teams of ten or at least more than 5 and play Among Us. We do as a team and it’s awesome!
leereeves
Among Us was my first thought, because it's a good social game, but is it a good team game? Encouraging dishonesty and distrust doesn't sound like a good team-building exercise.

Perhaps it depends on how much the team already trusts one another.

heavenlyblue
Does that imply I can’t play poker with my coworkers?
olyjohn
It's not real though. My team understands that it's just a fun game... and we have an awesome time playing every week.
auslegung
We tend to play Among Us and we have a blast. The inside jokes continue for weeks afterwards
gigatexal
It is! Because if your team is on good terms it’s more of a laugh than legit lying to hurt others on your team.
codr7
But there's nothing funny about being dishonest and lying, calling it a game changes nothing.
summm
you can't really talk during the rounds, so not much bonding potential
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dcas
I think the single best thing for me are just casual video chats. Whether they‘re 1on1, the whole team or randomized chat groups like the Donut bot does, doesn‘t matter. But it‘s important that they don‘t have a work-related agenda so no one feels pressured to get some specific outcome.
Aliabid94
Trivia nights are a fun bonding exercise and easy to do over zoom. We've had fun making our own online jeopardy boards.
SecureToaster
We've done: - Bake pizza (and chat) - Played a selection of mini games, trivia, apps, what ever people found. pictionary works well on zoom for instances. - Quiz. Each team had to prepare 10 points worth of questions, each team = 1 round. A good compere makes or breaks it. Inc bonus rounds like "2 minutes to find the oldest food item in your cupboard" - paid for www.theeventscompany.co.uk for 1 evening. Not idea how much they charged us.

Also using zooms break out rooms to split us up into small groups of 4-6 so you can have a more personal chat really. Do that for 10m. Then shuffle the rooms. In a 20 room only a few people will really talk.

Bashmaistora
Online board games on a video call is a fun option.
boomeranked
We run "trips" to Paris, if you want to bring your team to the city of lights! Live footage from Paris, cheese and wine delivered, the whole nine yards!

https://www.woyago.com/

MaxHoppersGhost
This is very well done, nice job. My team is back in the office but wish we did this during quarantine.
victormustar
This is not particularly original but I built a little social game for work teams a while ago (before the pandemic): https://live.jubiwee.com/ - We enjoy using it with my team from time to time. The goal is to bring back social interaction even if we all work from home (for what it worth).
Hansenq
This is a tough problem! Every quarter I have budget in the same range as yours that I try to fill up. Some good things that have worked for me outside of the normal board games/order takeout are:

- Team Japanese cooking class via Kenji Y--we really enjoyed this one! The recipes are simple and super tasty and he's a great educational host. https://kenjiskitchen.com/

- Mixology class hosted by Avital--I have one scheduled for next month and I'm pretty excited! https://avitaltours.com/

If I have leftover budget I use that to buy a nice gift/box of chocolates/macarons/etc and send it out at the end of the quarter, but I agree, it's tough to plan bonding events while remote. Any little bit of planning an event helps though!

chapium
Give everyone $100 and tell them to take a half day at work.
avgDev
Anyone who has a family and hobbies liked this comment.
maerF0x0
And there's only one rule. No work during the half day off.
11235813213455
getting outside is the important part, no special need for extra money (more than salary), say no to (over-)consumerism!
schwartzworld
Underrated comment.

Personally Zoom "socializing" doesn't work for me. I'd rather stick a needle in my eye than sit around and watch my co-workers pretend to have fun. We do a weekly hangout and occasionally meetings will devolve into social time but group video chats feel like meetings, not fun.

aranelsurion
I wonder why you would think they pretend.

Any sufficiently large group will likely have its loners and social butterflies, and butterflies are the people who tend to be loud, joke around, and generally try and find (even if shallow) topics to talk about.

I'd rather consider it as a character trait, than straight up dishonesty. It's also nice to have a few of those people in a group, otherwise any meeting w/o a clearly defined topic would become too quiet and depressive. They are the people who break the ice, I don't see why they can't be having fun doing that.

I agree about the "zoom socializing" part though. Mainly because what Zoom offers is a fairly flat space where you're either one of the 20 people talking/hearing at the same time (so you gotta be loud) or you don't exist. You can't easily form a bubble of three people and discuss something all three of you care about, and any topic with 20 other people either becomes too exclusive (3 talkers and 17 listeners) or too shallow. (a 20-people grand debate about the weather)

jaggs
I've been looking at wonder.me recently. It has some nice features, including the spontaneous breakouts you're talking about.
schwartzworld
> I wonder why you would think they pretend.

Because it is unfathomable to me that it could genuinely be a positive experience.

jscud
We recently had a fun remote event: a painting class.

A local company shipped supplies to each person (canvas, brushes, paints) and held a video session with a teacher who walked us through how to paint a particular picture step by step. Accessible for beginners, many of us had never painted before.

cjohnson318
That's great! It's really hard to create a safe space for people to do art.
phemartin
Loved the idea of having a remote manual activity to spark joy.
tharkun__
This is the kind of thing that really depends on the team you have. If you tried this with me on the team... well good luck. I might hate you for the rest of my life. They actually tried this at a previous job with a "pottery class".

Of course your marketing team might really love this. Or the guy on one of the other teams here that actually was on part-time so he could do all his paintings and prepare for his exhibition.

herval
Why would you hate someone for sending you some painting materials? This sounds like a fun idea with a low barrier of entry - if you just don't want to do it, you can always... not attend? Just watch?
tharkun__
I apologize for not making it more clear. I had been reading all the threads and one common concept was "forced fun".

This comes in various forms as you can read there from very openly forced to very subtly. So if you force me to go go karting I may not complain personally though some others might. But if you force me to do painting or pottery class that changes quite rapidly.

gknoy
I don't know what the per-person budget is, but our team had a really enjoyable time doing one of those group painting activities. They shipped us supplies, and we all were in a Zoom meeting together. I notice the resulting painting on my mantle about once or twice a week, and it always makes me smile with thoughts about how fun that was, and how much I enjoy the people with whom I work.
moistbar
Jackbox games like Patently Stupid or Fibbage are great since only one person has to buy the game in order for everyone to play. Just do a screen share of the main screen and have everyone connect using their phones. My friends and I do it frequently and it works great.
mbohorquez
I can't recommend these enough. The game packs can be bought in Steam, and there are games for everyone (trivia, drawing, puzzles). The trivia games even have a "Disable US centric questions" so everyone on the globally distributed team can enjoy them.

I started remotely last year and playing these kind of games have been a great way to get to know the team in a more informal setting.

moistbar
I heartily recommend Talking Points. Most of the work is done by actual players, rather than relying on the game to provide trivia or whatever, so there's no way for someone to play in advance and figure out all the answers ahead of time.
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jebarker
My team recently did a virtual escape room. Was well organized and encouraged communication and collaboration within the team. We used this company: https://www.puzzlebreak.us
jdlyga
Anything that involves free stuff. Cooking class with free ingredients, a painting class with free paint, a wine tasting with free wine. Just anything but a regular old zoom "happy hour".
bkanber
I always have fun with gather.town. Pictionary in particular is a blast.
politelemon
Sadly it seems to block other browsers

>To ensure a high quality experience, join Gather on Chrome!

bkanber
I use gather.town on Firefox/Ubuntu all the time FWIW. Seems to be perfectly supported.
m_a_g
Tabletop Simulator was a lifesaver for us. We play it every week and I can't recommend it enough.
IvyMike
Everybody gets sent a lego set and (for those who can) a drink, and you spend a couple of hours building and talking.
mytailorisrich
That's a creative idea. I'm writing it down!

Where I work the Xmas party was obviously cancelled because of Covid so I was expecting an online event paid-for or gift vouchers, but they said that in the end we got zilch and they decided to give away the budget to charity because "that felt like the right thing to do"... Well, for moral and engagement no it wasn't...

lazyasciiart
We had an online event with takeout meals paid for, you had to choose from about four local restaurants and pick it up day of.
dolmen
Our Xmas party was also canceled. But we got €100 to spend on food (either restaurant or raw food for cooking) and that's was cool.
Kluny
Rad idea! I was given an IKEA-branded lego set for Christmas and it was good for hours of entertainment during the winter break.
tschwimmer
My team did this recently and it was a lot of fun!
dolmen
Which LEGO set?

I'm wondering which LEGO set would be appropriate for an adult non-AFOL public...

Siyfion
We had a real DJ come and start off each day in spectacular fashion over video link recently. The team LOVED it, he took requests and it got everyone awake and excited for the day ahead. Plus, it drove a great team discussion on our musical tastes! (We had https://djgraffiti.com/ - Can't recommend him enough!)
nathanwallace
Agree! We've just been doing a simple Spotify playlist before all hands, shared over Zoom. Works great with everyone just quietly hanging out together for a while and sets the mood for the meeting. Most recent was a 1992 theme for our internal launch celebration of https://steampipe.io (a tool to query cloud resources using SQL).
djgraffiti
Thanks so much for the shout out. Happy to bring you all closer as a team. If you can make it by early to the set tomorrow I'll have Paradise Circus cued up for you!
[dead] Delge
Nice to see fans here.
jcomo
Co-founder of Offsyte here (https://www.offsyte.co). We created Offsyte as a solution for this problem (not just virtual, but finding fun team events in general). You can find & book events directly on the platform - I'm even seeing some of the vendors we work with in this thread!

You can find escape rooms, cooking & cocktail classes, magic shows and more. Many events have a delivery component so that there's no pre-work required for the team.

Feedback welcome! You can also email me at jonathan [at] offsyte.co

masterofsome
I really like this. Where I work, my boss just picks a place on Airbnb near the beach, and we stay there for the weekend. Will recommend this to my boss.
ryandrake
Seems like a cool idea for normal-times remote work, but a very terrible idea during a raging deadly and highly communicable pandemic.
mbohorquez
I really enjoy jack party games (someone buys it, shares the screen and everyone else connects by phone), but for a quicker setup this page is great: https://skribbl.io/

It's free and it's like playing pictionary, everyone can enjoy via a link after the host creates the room.