Slack, the top tool for team communication, also facilitates playing games that help build team rapport, strengthen connections, and foster collaboration. The Slack app offers many choices, while many offered by third-party vendors integrate with the app.
Slack is an excellent communication method for businesses with either an entirely virtual workforce or hybrid teams. As the virtual workforce continues to increase, there has become a greater need for virtual team-building activities and social games you can play online to build team culture. Enter Slack games for remote teams.
Table of Contents
What Is The Purpose Of Gameplaying For Remote Teams?
When individuals engage in remote work, the workday can feel long and monotonous. In addition, the team members often feel disconnected from the rest of the team. As a leader, you can use the Slack channel to promote team bonding and to build morale, as well as for work communication and collaboration.
Playing fun games and asking icebreaker questions are ways to help your team get to know one another and improve company culture while having fun.
What Are The Best Games For Remote Teams?
There are many different types of games that you can play with remote teams. Most of them fall into a few categories.
- Ice Breakers: Fames can help people get to know one another.
- Morale Boosting: Sometimes, people need the okay to relax and be happy. Virtual coffee breaks or virtual happy hours bring staff together in a more social context. You can even buy them a drink by sending your staff a few bucks (or a gift card) to symbolically purchase the beverage of their choice when inviting them to this type of event.
- Quick Brain Breaks: Games designed to be played in 2 minutes or less are more of a brain break than an engagement piece.
- Team Building: When encouraging staff to play games where they have to work together to find success, those are team-building activities.
- Problem-Solving: Learning to solve a murder mystery or plan an escape as part of a problem-solving game can help teams approach work problems.
Are There Games You Can Play On Slack?
Some of the best Slack games for remote teams are easy, quick little things you can create yourself. Consider starting small by gathering opinions with Slack polls to ask work-related questions or to vote on work-related issues and inviting workers to more complicated games.
Since you can integrate many different programs into Slack, experiment to see what works. Many games your team can play in a virtual realm are not Slack-dependent. Examples include virtual escape rooms, online mystery theater, and other remote games.
How Do You Play These Popular Games On Slack?
Slack games are bot integrations that interact with users via conversation that you can download on the Slack App Store. Here are some excellent ones worth trying.
Chessbot
Chess is a game of strategy and thinking. You can challenge a colleague to a game of chess and receive a notification when your opponent has played. The program will analyze your play after to provide a learning experience if you want to use that option. Keep a workplace leaderboard for some fun competition.
Codenames
This engaging game has two teams, where the members know the codenames of spies but must identify the real person behind the codenames. You can play this game online through many virtual forums, including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, video calls, and Slack.
Exploding Kittens
Exploding Kittens is an in-person game modified to be played remotely on Zoom, Google Meet, or Slack. It is a kitty version of Russian roulette where players try not to be the one who explodes the kitten.
As each player draws a virtual card, they hope not to pull an exploding kitten card. It’s really that simple.
GameMonk
GameMonk includes three fun Slack games (Categories, Giphy, and Trvias) teams can play in just a couple of minutes. For Categories, each person has 60 seconds to list as many things that belong in the category as they can. The person with the most unique words listed wins. Giphy offers a GIF, and team members have to try to guess a hashtag that would accompany the GIF. It also offers Trivia games to check general knowledge.
Ping Pong
You can create a Slack virtual Ping Pong tournament and keep the statistics using PongUp! Challenge a team member and play the game in the #games channel.
Rock Paper Scissors (Janken)
Have you ever played rock paper scissors to decide who had to perform a task or who got the privilege of sitting shotgun in the car? Slack apps include a version of this game that requires making quick decisions as a short brain break or icebreaker game.
Tic-Tac-Toe
The childhood game tic-tac-toe can be played through ricotta on the Slack channel. Games don’t have to be long or complicated to provide a fun way to take a break, build camaraderie, and engage with coworkers in real-time.
Water Cooler Trivia
Send out trivia questions weekly and get staff members watching and ready to compete. This game offers a free trial for teams looking to try something new for remote team building without committing to any cost.
Zomg Memes
Imagine carrying on an entire conversation with coworkers through Slack using Zomg Memes. This fun game to play involves someone playing a meme and everyone playing one that is related. Playing one at a time, the team members need to add to the list of memes in a way that makes sense to them.
Another option is to play a version of Apples to Apples using memes. In this game, one player chooses a topic, and all other players have 20 seconds to add a related meme to the conversation. The player then chooses which meme best fulfills the topic or word. Play continues with each player taking turns choosing the topic and picking the best option.
The same concept can be used to play games using GIFS by using Giphy or emojis.
Other Culture-Building Perks of Slack
You can program the Slack bot to remind leadership or team members about important events in the lives of remote workers.
The birthday bot remembers dates for birthdays, while you can plug in wedding anniversaries and work anniversaries to remind team members of those milestone dates too.
You are missing out if you have not considered using Slack as an employee engagement tool!
