Why Game Nights? 🤔

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As a reaction to the global pandemic and remote work, online game nights have become a new and popular trend among many teams. They are not only remote friendly, but are also a great team-building event and a surefire way to get your entire team engaged. They provide an opportunity for employees to socialize and build community, which is often a challenge in the remote workplace. Game nights also offer a break from everyday work and can have numerous mental health benefits for your employees, not to mention improve their overall engagement and sense of belonging in the company. As a manager, game nights prove to be much more impactful than happy hours or company dinners, as playing games with someone shows you how they:

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• Think and problem solve
• React to winning and losing
• Behave and lead in a team environment

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Why Game Nights are so Successful 🕹️

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It’s no secret that game nights are a great way to get your team all fired up, but the question of why this genre of event is so successful is a bit more complicated. It all boils down to gaming psychology: the need for achievement, socialization and immersion. Game nights are generally extremely successful because they can tap into these three needs. In addition, game nights provide a competitive environment, which greatly appeals to the competitive nature of most individuals.

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Event Ideas 💡

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With millions of games in existence, the possibilities of what game to choose for your game night are limitless. To help answer this headache-inducing question, our team at Epoch has compiled a list of some of our favorite games to play during game night:

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• Scribbl.io ✏️ — acts like online pictionary, where drawers and guessers try to accumulate as many points as possible
• Tetris 👾 — see this link for a comprehensive definition (we recommend running a Tetris tournament using jstris)
• Among Us 👨‍🚀 — a social deduction game where crewmates aboard a spaceship try to vote out impostors before they kill everyone
• Wikiracing 🏎️ — a race where competitors try to get from a designated Wikipedia page to another using only internal links (example: strawberries to Confucianism)
• Virtual Escape Room — a real escape room that can be played online, check out this list of top top-rated rooms
• Gartic Phone 📞 — an online rendition of broken telephone where messages are transmitted through text and pictures 
• Draw Battle ✍️ — two teams face off to see whose guessers can guess their drawers’ word first (think of it as a team version of scribbl.io)
• Codenames 🕵️ — a guessing game where two teams try to guess their set of cards using information from their respective spymasters (an even number of players is recommended)

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This list is by no means comprehensive: feel free to use your own game night ideas, or ask your team for online games they want to play!