10 of the Best Ice-Breaker Games for Your Next Networking Event

We all want to connect, and networking is one of the most effective ways to meet like-minded people. It’s a way to share vital expertise and find people working to solve similar problems, or who can help expand your business.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. In fact, for many people – hello, introverts! – even the idea of attending an event can be daunting. These nerves can hamper conversations and make it hard to get past the surface-level chatter and into the deeper stuff.

That is where ice-breakers come in. They can get people to loosen up, talk more, and have deeper conversations.

Stuck for ideas? We’ve got you covered. Here are 10 of the best ice-breaking games that we at Humanitix swear by. They are sure to get any event started on the right foot, and we have included a few that will work just as well at your next virtual event.

What are ice-breaker games and how can they help people connect?

Simply put, an ice-breaker game is an activity designed to get people interacting, even if they have never met before. They can build community, teamwork and empathy among participants, and give people some fodder for conversations later in the event. Plus, it can reveal people’s fun side, which might not get so much airtime at work. Activities can be silly, fun or more focused – pick and choose from the list below to come up with your perfect combination.

Game ideas for in-person events

1. No Smiling

For this game, the leader will get everyone to stand in a circle and ask for one volunteer to stand or sit in the middle. The person in the middle is not allowed to smile or laugh, under any circumstances. Then everyone standing on the outside takes a turn to tell their best joke or pull their funniest face – basically, whatever they can do to make the volunteer in the middle crack up.

2. Connecting Circle

This is a great game to improve group cohesiveness and get everyone to remember each other’s names.

The group members sit in a large circle and the leader explains that a good way to remember a name is to associate it with a fact about them. For example, “My name is Larry Queen and I love to eat hummus.” Go around the circle, repeating each name and hobby of those who preceded them. This means that the chain gets longer and longer, and harder to remember. If someone messes up, the circle starts again. Keep going until the whole chain gets recited by ‘Larry’ again.

While this is a lot of fun, we should note that it might create anxiety for some participants with a short attention span or less memory span, so this is worth keeping in mind. 

3. Volcano

For this one, everyone will stand up and start walking around the room. The organiser will then shout out the name of something – like volcano, or microwave – and everyone will have to do their best to physically form that thing. For example, if the organiser shouts “Volcano, 1,2,3,4,5”, everyone will do their best volcano impression on the count of 5.

This one is great for getting people moving, and making some funny shapes! Bonus points for the worst or silliest interpretation.

4. Card Games

Card games are a great, low-stakes way to get people to start working together. Some of our favourite classics are snap, Go Fish! and Higher or Lower. For big events, you can divide people into smaller ‘break-out’ games, which is also a good chance to pair people who don’t know each other very well (yet).

5. Charades (animal edition)

Just like your classic game of charades, except that everyone needs to mimic an animal!

Get people in teams of three or four, and have an organiser hand out cards with animals written on them. Each team nominates an actor, who will then act out as many animals as they can in one minute, without talking! The winning team is the one who gets the most answers right – but we recommend bonus points for the silliest animal impersonation.

6. Scavenger Hunt for People in the Room

This one is great for getting everyone in the room to talk to one another.

The organiser will hand out a list to each participant for the people that you will have to “find”. These can include things like “the youngest person in the room”, “the person who can speak the most languages”, or “the person with the largest feet”. About 10 -20 characteristics is best, depending on the size of the group.

Once you find the person you are looking for, get them to sign their initials next to the attribute. The first person to find everyone on the list is the winner.

7. Eye Contact

Everyone moves around the room until the organiser says “Freeze!” Each person makes eye contact with someone else in the room and hold it. Once everyone has paired up, they are told to walk to each other and introduce themselves. Each person then tells an interesting fact about themselves. Each group member reports the interesting fact back to the larger group.

Game ideas for virtual events

8. Pop Quiz

The beauty of the pop quiz is that it can be about anything – from silly topics such as naming five tropical fish, to testing some industry-specific knowledge so that participants can flex their big brains.

9. Ice-Breaker Questions

As an organiser, devise a list of fun questions and then ask each participant to answer them in turn. This is a great way to learn something new or interesting about someone that you might never normally learn.

Some ideas might be:

1. What album would you bring to a desert island and why? Inspired by Desert Island Discs, this allows people to talk about music and share some personal interests that aren’t usually brought up in networking events.
2. What is the story behind your name? Almost everyone has an interesting story or fact behind their first, middle, or last name.
3. What celebrity, living or dead, would you invite as a dinner guest?

10. Two Truths and a Lie

This game is so much fun, you might want to play it outside of networking contexts. In this, each participant tells the room two truths and one lie about themselves. The rest of the participants have to guess which one is the lie. If you have some pretty good storytellers in the mix, you can also intensify this game and get them to tell a long, embellished story and have the whole room decide if they are lying, as on popular UK show, Would I Lie To You?

As with any event, it is always important to consider your participants and what games they are comfortable with and ensure a theme that caters to all accessibility requirements.

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