Ever since COVID became a thing in our daily lives, remote work has become more prevalent. Whilst there’s a huge amount to gain from remote working, we do lose those colloquial chats by the water cooler or board/card games in lunch breaks.

In my experience, it’s common for companies to offer a 1-2 hour social meeting on Fridays - maybe just to chat, or with a game at the forefront.

It’s been a few years now since COVID started, and we’ve all tried lots of games. Here’s a list of games you should try, and what I think about them.

Free

| VirtualVacation | 4 | Like GeoGuessr, but with a video - and everyone can have their own guess!

| GeoGuessr | 4 | Move around Google Maps Streetview and work as a team to guess where you are!

| QuackStanley | 5 | Much like Snakeoil, a “buyer” is offered goods from each other player in turn (based on a choice of 2 of 4 topics). Weird and creative, and super fast to pick up | | Countdown | 4.5 | The classic British game CountDown, with both word/number/pre-generated anagram challenges, a big block, and even the music! Everyone plays at the same time, and competes to find the highest score. | | | | | Drawasaurus | 4 | You’re either drawing or typing in a thoughtful frenzy to guess what one player’s drawing is. I like how this game keeps everyone involved, and is leninet on spelling mistakes | | Codenames | 4 | The classic word-game Codenames - be sure to set a timer so people don’t take 7 minutes to find the perfect clues (which may not even work!) | | Globle | 4 | Guess where a mystery country is! | | TeamBridge.app | 3.5 | There’s 6 free games, but they’re pretty quiet. For example, Cosel (“broken telephone”) has e.g. 10 people drawing and describing plenty of images, which takes a lot of focus; the fun comes when the whole group sees how words evolved. But it’s cute and there’s variety, so give it a try one week! | | Chameleon | 3 | For a category (animals, fruits, etc.) all but one player see the same word. They give clues to show they know what the word is - but not enough obvious information so that the “chameleon” can guess the word and blend in with the group! | | | | | Wavelength | 2.5 | An ingenius digital board for the game “Wavelength” - be sure to read the instructions. I find it so difficult to think of a word on the spot such that this game isn’t really fun to me - but discussing and guessing other people’s words is OK | | Hanab | ? | A cooperative game where a team of pyrotechnics give each other information to build 5 fireworks | | Categories with Friends/Scattergories | ? | Each player writes a word with each category, getting double points if it matches the round’s special letter. Think someone has made something up? A quick vote will settle it! | | | |

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