Get Happy

Everyone loves a good happy hour. Whether it is getting a drink together at a local bar to blow off some steam or taking a break in the middle of the day to play a game and chat with colleagues, building unstructured time for employees to engage outside of day-to-day task completion is important to maintain company culture and productivity. As a manager, building unstructured time for employees to engage can help reduce burnout and employee turnover, while also creating deeper communication bonds between employees.

Every organization handles unstructured employee time a little bit differently. At Lithios, we have a variety of different ways that our employees can interact outside of work. We have monthly lunches at local restaurants, yearly company retreats, and overall make a consistent effort to prioritize weekly time for employees to play games together and break away from work during a scheduled happy hour. With our staff becoming increasingly remote alot of our activities are shifting online. For this blog we are going to highlight our top 5 virtual happy hour activities.

Our Top Five Happy Hour Activities

1. Geoguessr
2. Jackbox
3. Scribl
4. Among Us
5. Garticphone

Garticphone

Garticphone is a suite of mini games that involve drawing, animating, and competing. In short it is a mix of pictionary and telephone. Players take turns drawing pictures and mimicking other drawings while trying to maintain the same level of fidelity and detail. It is based on individual rounds and players have the chance to compete against each other while recreating various images. The game facilitates up to 14 players and is a well designed and different experience than other drawing games.

Among Us

Among Us is a game of teamwork and betrayal. The game became immensely popular during the COVID 19 lockdown. Players can host or join lobbies from their phone or gaming device. Our team would join a Discord server to communicate while playing the game on our individual mobile devices. The game mimics the mechanics of the game mafia. In the game, players collaborate to complete tasks and avoid getting killed by the unknown “imposters”. The game is most well known for moments of social engineering and deceit as players seek to be the last one standing in a lobby.

Scribl

Scribl is a free drawing game that is most similar to the board game Pictionary. In the game, a single user takes a turn selecting a word out of three choices and then drawing the chosen word for the other players in the game. The other players are only able to see the drawing and must race to guess what the chosen word is in under 80 seconds to get the most points. After three rounds of drawing, the person with the most points wins the game. This game provides a fun opportunity for our team to be creative and channel artistic talents.

Jackbox

Jackbox is a party pack of mini-games for 1-8 players. These games include include Quiplash, Fibbage, Drawful, Trivia Murder Party, and more. The individual games in the party pack are trivia, drawing, quiz, or audience response formatted. To play these mini-games, one user needs to set up a screenshare of the game with a hosted link while the other players use a join code on their phone browser to enter the lobby and remit responses. The player hosting the game will have the ability to share responses from the audience and choose the mini-game that is played by the team. The Jackbox team is constantly updating the mini-games in the pack and there is enough variety to enjoy playing for hours on end.

Geoguessr

Our favorite game to play is Geoguessr. Geoguessr is a game built using Google Maps. In the game, the team is dropped at a street view of a random location on the globe. It is the aim of the team to navigate around the landscape to read road signs, identify clues, and try to figure out where the location is on the globe. The game is randomized so that you could be dropped on a street anywhere imaginable so leveraging all relevant visual clues and team perspectives is essential to get the most accurate guess. Typically when we play this game as a team, we have one person host, share their screen and move around while everyone else on the team works together to get the highest number of points. We often find that members of our team have traveled to varying locations or are able to read the languages of the signs and roadmarks. Listening to this team feedback allows us to more accurately guess the location information and get a larger number of points for a more accurate guess. Through Geoguessr you can also play custom games with only specific locations saved such as only country capitals, McDonalds locations, or the seven wonders of the world. These custom variations give some novelty to the game if you are tired of the standard game modes.

Conclusion

During the pandemic, our team was forced to find games and activities that we could complete together from a remote environment. We have spent many hours playing the games listed and have fond memories of the unstructured time spent with team members from all over. As things get closer to being back to a pre-pandemic normal, we hope to find new and unique ways to enjoy our time together both online and in the real world.

Got a favorite happy hour activity, let us know here!