Remote teams don't lack tools — they lack the small, unplanned moments that make a group of coworkers feel like a team. The good news: you don't need another video call to get them back. The best remote team games happen right inside Slack, asynchronously, where everyone already spends their day.
Here are nine games that work — a mix of Slack apps and games you can run with nothing but a channel and an emoji keyboard.
1. Trivia with TriviaStack
Trivia is the most reliable Slack game there is: everyone can play, it takes thirty seconds, and a leaderboard gives people a reason to come back. TriviaStack lets you build custom games around the topics and difficulty your team actually likes — twelve categories, easy to hard, however many questions you want — or run the Daily Stack of fresh questions on autopilot. It's free for the whole workspace, nobody needs an account, and play is fully async: teammates answer when it suits them and scores tally automatically.
Best for: a game you can tailor to your team and run whenever you like.
2. Emoji movie quiz
No app needed. Someone posts a movie title written entirely in emoji (🦁👑 or 🕷️🧑) and the channel races to guess it in the thread. Rotate the quizmaster each day. Works just as well with songs, books, or your own products.
3. Two truths and a lie
The classic icebreaker, made better by Slack's pace. Each week one person posts three statements about themselves; teammates vote with number emojis on which is the lie, and the answer drops at the end of the day. You learn more about a coworker in one round than in a month of standups.
4. Coffee roulette with Donut
Not a game in the points-and-winners sense, but Donut's random pairing of teammates for short virtual coffees is one of the most effective ways to recreate hallway conversations. Pair it with a prompt ("find one thing you both did before this job") to give the call a game-like goal.
5. This-or-that polls with Polly
Polly turns quick polls into a running game: post a daily either/or ("mountains or beach?", "tabs or spaces?") and let the results fuel the thread. Low effort, surprisingly heated, and a painless way to get quieter teammates participating.
6. The Wordle leaderboard channel
Make a #wordle channel and have everyone paste their daily grid. The emoji-square results are spoiler-free by design, and a simple weekly tally (lowest total guesses wins) turns a solo habit into a team competition. Works for any daily puzzle game your team is into.
7. Photo scavenger hunts
Post a weekly prompt — "your workspace from where you sit", "the oldest thing in your kitchen", "your pet looking unimpressed" — and let photos roll in through the week. Finish with a poll for the winner. It's the fastest way to get a window into teammates' lives without anyone writing a paragraph.
8. Guess whose…
Collect answers privately (a DM or form works), then post them anonymously: whose desk is this? whose first concert was this? whose most-played song? The channel guesses in threads. Brilliant for teams that have onboarded people who've never met in person.
9. Live drawing breaks
For the rare synchronous moment — the last ten minutes of a Friday call — drop a link to a shared drawing game like skribbl.io in the channel. It's chaotic, it's silly, and it resets a tired team better than any retro format.
How to choose
- Default to async. Games that demand everyone show up at once exclude someone in every timezone. Async games include everyone by default.
- Make it opt-in. The fastest way to kill a game is to make it mandatory. A dedicated channel people choose to join beats posting in #general.
- Pick a ritual over a one-off. One great game every day beats a different game every week. Familiarity is what turns participation into habit.
If you want the lowest-effort starting point, a daily trivia question is hard to beat — and you can set it up free with TriviaStack in about a minute. For more ideas beyond games, see our guide to team building activities for Slack.