"Brain teaser" type games for large group

December 6, 2018 10:32 AM

Our group--about 100 to 150 people--is having a holiday party next week in a restaurant, in a private back room. The big boss is suggesting we plan some kind of game(s) with "brain teaser" type questions.

It feels easier to come up with ideas for smaller groups, but not sure what would work for such a large group.

Ideas can't be raunchy or particularly physical. We are a small university, and this party will be for faculty across all departments and their staff. We will provide a prize or a couple of prizes (small, e.g. box of spiffy chocolates). Best if we can plug in org-specific questions or challenges or themes or whatever. I guess what we need is a basic structure or format?

We can't really throw any money at this. Nothing terribly complex or that requires lots of time-consuming prep or large physical props.

posted by primate moon to Work & Money (11 answers total)

Oooh, interesting. I am envisioning something where perhaps a smaller group of people could participate while others watch? For me, it would be so fun to be a spectator for my more outgoing colleagues. Otherwise, maybe some kind of trivia thing where people could compete on teams (good-naturedly, of course).
posted by bookworm4125 at 10:35 AM on December 6, 2018

Play a giant game of Wits & Wagers with teams. You can easily make up your own questions for that.
posted by jozxyqk at 10:39 AM on December 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

Working in departments/teams "you have five minutes to get from [random/funny wikipedia article] to our University's wikipedia page in the fewest clicks".
posted by Ufez Jones at 10:39 AM on December 6, 2018 [8 favorites]

We've done trivia quizzes in the past. One year we had a "this is a landmark on Google Maps - identify it" round which went down a treat.
posted by kariebookish at 10:43 AM on December 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

Seconding Wits & Wagers - it is really fun!
posted by soelo at 10:52 AM on December 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

Puzzled Pint has nearly 8 years of puzzle sets in its archive.
posted by phunniemee at 11:05 AM on December 6, 2018

A Christmas carol reebus might work for some parties, though maybe not in a large, diverse group.
posted by chrisamiller at 12:11 PM on December 6, 2018

You could get a copy of MindTrap for questions .... hundreds of lateral thinking puzzles.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:47 PM on December 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

Do you have access to a laptop and a projector that you could set up at the restaurant? If so, Kahoot.it or Quizizz.com might be what you're looking for. Often at teacher PD days we'll use one or the other for the type of icebreaker trivia games you're talking about because everybody's got a mobile device in their pocket, right? The games work on basically any mobile device and are totally customizable. I prefer Quizizz because it displays the question and answer choices on the devices while Kahoot requires that you display the questions separately. Both Kahoot and Quizizz have ready-made trivia-style quizzes that are simple to customize with your own questions. Best of all, both are free.
posted by blessedlyndie at 3:49 PM on December 6, 2018

Response by poster: Thanks for all the great responses. It turns out this particular task, of coming up with and implementing ideas for games, has been put into somebody else's hands and I think will probably end up getting dropped altogether. My bigger concern, though, was this is NOT a game-playing type crowd, and I won't be surprised if we get hardly any turnout at next year's party as people want to avoid them. Thanks again!
posted by primate moon at 10:52 AM on December 7, 2018

Get each team/department/subgroup to submit trivia questions about their area in advance - then compile them into a big list and set people off to go mingle and see who can get all the answers first.
posted by quacks like a duck at 11:03 AM on December 7, 2018