Planning team building activities for large groups can be a huge undertaking. Having done just that for more than 25 years, we would know! Since 1999, Watson Adventures has grown to span the nation, with more than 1 million people participating in team building scavenger hunts, murder mystery activities, and trivia games, including the employees of thousands of prestigious corporations. What’s more, our scavenger hunts and trivia games have accommodated large group team building games for hundreds of participants—often in one location, and sometimes spread across multiple sites.
Needless to say, we’ve seen it all. We’ve learned what makes large group team building truly work and what falls flat. So whether you’re planning for 20 people or 200, we’re sharing top activity ideas to spark connection, collaboration, and, of course, fun.
Benefits of Large Group Team Building
Intimate group events can be a great way to build camaraderie within smaller teams, but these activities can’t take the place of large group team building involving your broader department or even company. Large group team building activities offer numerous benefits for organizations at large, making them a valuable investment. Here are five key advantages:
- Breaking down silos: Large group activities help people interact across teams, departments, or even hierarchy levels. This fosters better collaboration and communication company-wide—not just within immediate work teams or pods.
- Strengthening company culture: By working together toward a common goal, employees develop stronger bonds. It fosters trust and a sense of camaraderie, essential for a positive and productive workplace. It also reinforces shared values, goals, and identity, sending the message that everyone is part of the bigger picture, not just a cog in their own wheel.
- Boosting morale & motivation: Fun, engaging activities help reduce stress and increase job satisfaction. Employees feel valued, leading to a more positive work environment.
- Increasing employee engagement & retention: A strong team dynamic contributes to lower turnover rates and higher job commitment. Employees who feel connected to their colleagues and workplace culture are more engaged.
- Strengthening problem-solving skills: Team-building challenges push participants to think creatively and strategically. Employees learn to adapt and find innovative solutions to problems.
Tips for Planning Large Group Team Building Activities
- Define clear objectives: Before selecting activities, clarify the goals of your team-building event. Are you focusing on improving communication, collaboration, problem-solving, or simply boosting morale? Having clear objectives will help you choose the right activities.
- Choose inclusive and engaging activities: Ensure the activities cater to all participants, considering diverse interests, physical abilities, and comfort levels. Options like problem-solving challenges, scavenger hunts, or outdoor games often work well for large groups.
- Encourage collaboration, not competition: While a little friendly competition can be fun, team-building activities should prioritize cooperation and communication. Choose exercises that require groups to work together rather than just compete against each other.
- Stress less with help from the experts: Planning a team building event or outing—especially for a large group—can be stressful and time-consuming. After all, the larger the group, the more diversified the interests of those involved, and the more logistical work is involved in the planning process. Experienced team building event hosts like Watson Adventures can help lighten the lift from inception to execution and ensure you end up with an activity that is fun and engaging for everyone. After decades of experience planning and hosting team building activities for large groups, we know what works and what doesn’t, and we’ll work with you closely to plan the perfect activity for your group.
Looking for a specific category of team building activities for large groups? Jump ahead to see our suggestions.
- Outdoor team event ideas
- Ideas for indoor company outings
- In-office activity ideas
- Ideas for remote or hybrid teams
Outdoor Team Event Ideas
1. Neighborhood Scavenger Hunts
Whether you’re looking for a large group team building activity close to home or encouraging company retreat or conference attendees to explore their surroundings, Watson Adventures outdoor scavenger hunts are a great way to laugh, compete, and explore together. Teams use our browser-based app to follow clues to find cool features, surprising secrets, quirky architectural details, and fascinating hidden history. And as they go, they answer tricky questions about what they find.
With games in more than 55 cities around the U.S., your group might choose to…
- Discover the Secrets of Wall Street in New York
- Solve a Murder in Old Boston
- Explore the Secrets of the Loop in Chicago
- Visit Downtown Los Angeles Movie Locations
- Enjoy the Market Mania Scavenger Hunt at Seattle’s Pike Place Market
- “Celebrate Your City” with a sweeping scavenger hunt that can be tailored to your favorite places.
And that’s just to name a very few of your many options for scavenger hunts in your city. Consider this feedback from a recent happy client:
“Our team of 100 had a wonderfully fun time, and the coordination with Watson Adventures was super smooth and easy. The event hosts were communicative, and brought the energy and fun to our team, which was fantastic. This group was highly recommend to me by colleagues, and now I know why. If you need a fun team building event, you will not be disappointed by Watson Adventures!”
2. Sports & Games Festival
Hosting an outdoor sports & games festival for your workplace is a great opportunity for team bonding and friendly competition. First, consider a few logistics.
- Location: Choose a spacious outdoor venue like a park, sports field, or beach.
- Duration: Decide whether it’s a half-day or full-day event.
- Participants: Decide whether it’s for employees only or if families are invited.
- Theme & Branding: Incorporate company colors, banners, and merchandise.
- Refreshments & Entertainment: Consider hiring a food truck or trucks, and perhaps a DJ setup with music.
And then of course you’ll need activities themselves. Include a mix of competitive and fun activities to engage everyone. These can include:
- Competitive Sports such as soccer, basketball, volleyball, pickleball, spikeball, and relay races
- Casual & Fun Field Day Games such as sack races, three-legged races, egg-and-spoon races, cornhole, and giant Jenga
- Adventure & Wellness Activities such as kayaking, mini golf, and yoga
3. Games That Let You Adventure Anywhere
Our Classic Scavenger Hunts include multiple ways to organize large group team building games just about anywhere, anytime.
- Adventure Anywhere Hunts: Unleash your group’s creativity with a series of creative, collaborative challenges.
- Murder Mystery Mayhem Hunts: A killer hides among you! Play through trivia, unique challenges, unusual puzzles, and more to uncover the villain in your midst.
- “Celebrate Your City” Hunts: A scavenger hunt that gets your group flaunting their hometown pride in whatever area of your town or city you choose.
4. Volunteer Days
Consider coordinating volunteer opportunities where your group can give back to the community together. Activities might include building homes with Habitat for Humanity. Alternatively, you could work together on an outdoor volunteer project, such as park clean-up, tree planting, or building picnic tables. Groups compete to complete tasks efficiently while making a positive impact. It fosters teamwork while giving back to the community.
To sweeten the deal beyond the advantages of team bonding and feeling good about yourselves, you can always treat the group to a catered lunch or dinner in a restaurant’s private space afterward, or at a later date for all participants.
5. Food-Tour Scavenger Hunts
So you love food and you love a fun time. Why not both at once? Watson Adventures food-filled Munch Scavenger Hunts combine the best of two worlds. As you follow clues around a particular area and answer questions about what you find, the hunt recommends historic and delicious pizza places, ice cream vendors, patisseries, cake shops, exotic snack places, and more. Depending on your appetite, you can find anything from decadent desserts to bug-filled candy. (No, really!)
Our Munch Hunts are refreshed and revamped often, and we’re always keeping the food options fresh and tasty. Some of our Munch options include…
- Boston: Munch Around the North End Scavenger Hunt
- Chicago: Munch Around Fulton Market Scavenger Hunt
- Los Angeles: Munch Around Olvera Street Scavenger Hunt
- New Orleans: Munch Around the French Quarter Scavenger Hunt
- New York City: Munch Around Greenwich Village Scavenger Hunt
- San Francisco: Munch Around Chinatown & North Beach Scavenger Hunt
- Seattle: Munch Around Pike Place Market Scavenger Hunt
- Washington, D.C.: Munch Around Union Market Scavenger Hunt
Ideas for Indoor Company Outings
6. Museum Scavenger Hunts
You can’t go wrong with a trip to a world-class museum—and our museum scavenger hunts can handle groups with hundreds of participants. Discover fascinating stories and surprising secrets of art, science, history, and more. Some of our most popular museum scavenger hunts include:
- Boston: Twisted Science Scavenger Hunt at the Museum of Science
- Chicago: Museum of Natural Hysteria Scavenger Hunt at the Field Museum
- Los Angeles: Museum of Natural Hysteria Scavenger Hunt at the Natural History Museum of L.A. County
- New York: Met Madness Scavenger Hunt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Philadelphia: Revolutionary Philadelphia Scavenger Hunt at the Museum of the American Revolution
- Seattle: MoPOP Till You Drop Scavenger Hunt
- Washington, D.C.: Escape the Air & Space Museum Scavenger Hunt
7. The Marshmallow Challenge
Popularized by TED Talk-er Tom Wujec, the Marshmallow Challenge is a fun team building activity that encourages collaboration, creativity, and problem-solving. Teams compete to build the tallest freestanding structure using spaghetti, tape, string, and a marshmallow placed on top.
- Form teams of around 5 people or so and give them each a flat surface on which to work. Of course you’ll need plenty of space if your group numbers in the hundreds!
- Provide each team with 20 spaghetti sticks, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow.
- Set a timer for 18 minutes and challenge teams to build the tallest possible structure with the marshmallow on top.
- Measure the structures at the end, and the team with the tallest standing structure wins!
8. Egg Drop Challenge
The Egg Drop Challenge is another of the classic team building activities for large groups. Teams must work together to design a structure that will protect an egg from a high fall, emphasizing innovation and teamwork.
- Teams have 20 to 30 minutes to design and build their structures before testing them with a drop.
- Each team is provided with limited materials (e.g., straws, tape, rubber bands) to build a protective structure for the egg.
- The egg must be placed inside the structure, and it should not break when dropped from a designated height.
9. Aquarium Deep-Dive
Organize a day trip to, or rent out, a local aquarium. At many aquariums, you can provide meal vouchers, a private rented space, or plan group tours or special animal encounters. You might arrange educational talks or behind-the-scenes tours for added interest.
Or plan a scavenger hunt! We offer scavenger hunts at many of the finest aquariums around the country—in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Connecticut, Los Angeles, and more. Or you can solve a murder at any aquarium on a special version of the Murder Mystery Mayhem Scavenger Hunt.
10. Arcade Bars
You might think arcade bars, including the nationwide chain Barcade, are just for 20-somethings. But they make great spots for team bonding for groups of all sizes. Colleagues who love old arcade games or pinball can bond over those, while everyone else can bend elbows and chat over snacks. And arcade bars often have silly multiplayer games, such as racing games, four-person Pac-Man, and Bishi Bashi, that even non-gamers can enjoy.
In-Office Activity Ideas
11. Murder Mystery Games
If you’re looking for a crowd-pleaser that also encourages problem-solving and communication, a murder mystery game may be the perfect choice. DIY the experience with a theme, assigned roles, and simply props or partner with an event host like Watson Adventures to guide your group’s experience with minimal prep work.
With many team building murder mystery games to choose from, your event can be tailored to any group size or location. There might be a serial killer on the loose… Or is it a madman intent on poisoning you? Or a murder that might imperil the whole world? Our games feature all of these scenarios and more. Groups of any size break up into teams and compete through different mixes of challenges, trivia, puzzles, and more to solve whatever perplexing murder mystery you choose.
Our murder mystery offerings include:
• The Murder by Team Building Game
• The Killer Trivia Slam Game
• Puzzled to Death: A Game of Murder Mystery Puzzles
• The Case of the Curious Curator: A Virtual Murder Mystery Game
12. Minute to Win It Extravaganza
Minute to Win It games are fun, fast-paced challenges that encourage collaboration and creativity while providing laughter and friendly competition in a high-energy environment. Perfect for large groups broken up into smaller teams, the games require relatively few resources and easy set-up.
Depending on your group, some possible games include:
- Stack Attack: Teams race to stack a set of plastic cups into a pyramid and then take them down, all within 8 minutes.
- Penny Tower: Players must stack as many pennies as possible using only one hand in 8 minutes.
- Paper Dragon: Teams create the longest paper chain they can using only a roll of toilet paper within 8 minutes.
- Cup Blow: Teams race to blow plastic cups off a table using only a straw.
- Defying Gravity: Players keep three balloons in the air for 8 minutes using only their hands.
- Junk in the Trunk: One person wears a tissue box tied to their waist, and they must shake out all the ping pong balls inside by jumping.
- Cookie Face: A cookie is placed on the forehead, and players must get it into their mouths without using their hands.
- Spoon Frog: Teams launch spoons from the edge of a table into a cup, aiming for as many successful throws as possible within 8 minutes.
13. Lost in the Office
When you want fun team building activities for big groups but you also want to stay in the office, the Lost in the Office Scavenger Hunt is the game you’re looking for. You’ll rely on wits, imagination, and teamwork to sculpt, write, leap, eat, and act your way to victory.
In teams, your group will put their heads together and use their imaginations to complete entertaining tasks. You’ll be challenged to compose unusual and amusing team photos, collect or creative specific things (like in a classic scavenger hunt), crack a mysterious code, and more.
14. Two Truths and a Lie
“Two Truths and a Lie” is a fun and interactive icebreaker game designed to help team members get to know each other better. By sharing a mix of true and false statements, it sparks conversation and encourages creativity. This game fosters team bonding, builds trust, and creates a relaxed atmosphere for collaboration.
- Each participant thinks of three statements about themselves: two truths and one lie.
- Encourage everyone to think of fun facts and unusual tidbits about themselves, as opposed to less interesting facts like their favorite color or season of the year
- One at a time, each person shares their three statements with the group. The group must guess which statement is the lie.
- After everyone guesses, the individual reveals which statement was false.
- Continue until everyone has had a turn to share their statements.
- For larger groups, you can switch teams up afterward so colleagues get to participate with different people in subsequent rounds.
15. In-Office Trivia
Far more than your typical pub-trivia game, our Trivia Slam Games will tease your teams’ brains, and they can be played by groups of any size.
With audio and visual components, pop-culture mashups, music rounds, surprising twists, and creative photo challenges, as well as many different themes, these aren’t run-of-the-mill pub-trivia games anyone could throw together. Carefully constructed questions often provide context clues to help teams work their way toward the answers together. And for an additional fee, we can create a custom round of trivia for your group in any of our trivia games.
Just a few of our many varied trivia games include:
• The Trivia Slam Game Show
• The Fascinating Facts Trivia Game
• Cheers! The Happy Hour Trivia Game
• Rhythm & Clues: A Music Trivia Game
Ideas for Remote or Hybrid Teams
16. Virtual Scavenger Hunts
Many of our in-person scavenger hunts, particularly the Adventure Anywhere Scavenger Hunt, can be enjoyed no matter where your colleagues are. Players spread across different cities, states, even countries can play the same game at the same time, Zooming or Facetiming with the Host and other players. Then everyone “gathers” at the end to celebrate the winning team.
Even better? Your game can be customized to include a specific theme or particular challenges that reflect your company or organization’s values, products, and successes.
17. Online Pictionary
Teams take turns drawing images based on prompts while the rest of the team guesses the word. In-person groups can of course use a large drawing pad, while virtual groups can use Zoom functions such as Whiteboard and Screen Share. With a combination of those options, hybrid teams can participate together regardless of location. It’s fun, it’s creative, it encourages communication, and it’s bound to be more than a little silly.
Need inspiration for themed Pictionary prompts? Check these out:
- Office Life: Draw office-related items like staplers, desks, meetings, or even work-related jargon.
- Famous Landmarks: Think about iconic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, Great Wall of China, or Statue of Liberty.
- Movies and TV Shows: Create scenes or characters from popular films or series.
- Superheroes and Villains: Characters from comic books, movies, or TV shows like Batman, Spider-Man, or the Joker.
- Animals: Common animals or exotic ones, like koalas, giraffes, or penguins.
- Food and Drink: Popular foods and beverages, like pizza, sushi, or a cup of coffee.
- Sports: Different sports, equipment, or famous athletes.
- Fairy Tales and Myths: Draw classic fairy tale characters, such as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, or dragons and unicorns.
18. Hybrid Trivia Games
Hybrid groups of all sizes can enjoy our wide array of trivia games just about anywhere. So some players can participate in the office, or in a rented ballroom or restaurant space, while others Zoom in from multiple places at once. It might sounds complicated, but clients appreciate the flexibility of it all:
“Everyone loved the game, even the members who were on the fence about a virtual trivia event, they were so impressed at how fun and interactive it was. Watson Adventures is responsive, professional, and provides the utmost gold star customer service. Best experience ever!”
19. Virtual Cooking Classes
Such organizations as Kitchen on Fire offer virtual cooking classes for groups of virtually any size. These classes generally present you some limited menu options. Then before the event, you get a shopping list, an equipment list, and often ingredient-prep instructions. Hybrid groups can Zoom in from whatever kitchens they’re in, whether individually or in groups, wherever those kitchens might be! Hang out with colleagues, virtually or in-person, while learning a new skill, technique, or receipe.
20. Hybrid Happy Hour
Hosting a hybrid, or fully virtual, happy hour is a fun and engaging way to promote some team bonding, boost morale, and create a relaxed environment for colleagues to connect outside of work. With a little planning and creativity, you can make it an interactive and enjoyable experience for everyone.
Some tips for hosting a hybrid happy hour:
- Pick a Theme: Choose a fun theme like “Tropical Night” or “Trivia & Cocktails” to make the event more engaging.
- Send Invitations & Drink Suggestions: Share a calendar invite with drink recipes and mocktail options to set the mood.
- Plan Interactive Activities: Incorporate games like trivia, Pictionary, or icebreaker questions to keep everyone engaged.
- Encourage Casual Conversations: Create breakout rooms or discussion topics to help people connect naturally.
- Keep It Short & Sweet: Aim for 45 minutes to an hour to keep the energy high and avoid virtual fatigue.