Playing Trivia Games

When you think of team-building exercises in a company, you probably have visions of hours of brainstorming sessions combined with speeches by motivational speakers! To the contrary, management experts are nowadays employing games to build team spirit, and trivia games are believed to be one of the most effective team-building games.

Trivia games are preferred to many other games because they are easy to plan, do not need any exclusive venue to conduct in and no special game materials need to be purchased for them. And yet, they can be fairly competitive and enjoyable at the same time.

Trivia games are also popular with the participants of the team-building exercise as a sizeable majority already knows the rules of the games and even those who do not know them can quickly grasp the basics. Actually, there are no hard and fast rules in trivia games and so if you would like to lend some structure to the game, you can adopt them from other games such as Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy. If you are looking for a more structured format, you might want to follow the format and rules of Trivial Pursuit, with some slight modifications. You can alter the rules to make them more appropriate to the tastes and preferences of the participants. This way, not only will everyone understand the game more easily but they will also enjoy it more.

Of course, make sure that the questions are not too complicated - they should be challenging enough for the participants to enjoy answering them but simple enough that after sufficient effort, they are able to answer it. The main aim of the games is to build the spirit of co-operation between teams and it is important that everyone gets a fair shot at the questions. You can modify the rules and conditions of the game as you go along so that all contestants are sure to participate.

While you can include questions covering a variety of general topics such as current events, history, geography, sports and entertainment, you can also have some that touch upon topics relevant to the participants like management, commerce, science, mathematics and literature. However, as much as possible, questions related directly to work should be avoided since the team-building sessions are also supposed to be an opportunity for the participants to take a break from work. Formulate questions that will help the contestants to think of strategy planning and also increase their sense of competitiveness.

You can also try getting players in on a rotation basis so that even shy players get a chance to play. Players can play at a more relaxed pace and they can truly build their skills; something that might not happen if dozens of teams are competing at once.

The most important thing to bear in mind, while designing these trivia games is that, each and every one of them should enable the team-building exercise. Before you start the exercises, you should explain how the games would help your participants so that they can take part more whole-heartedly.