My Favorite Office Games

I’m not one who enjoys a sterile office environment. You know, the kind that makes you feel as if you are in a library and anything that “disrupts” is forbidden. I try to keep a very light (yet productive) office environment. In light of that I thought a post about some of my favorite office games would be fun.

Pool
When we moved into a bigger office last December I promptly went out and purchased a pool table. It’s not regulation size, but so what… it’s a blast. I’m frequently interrupting my employees and challenging them to a game. Nobody here is a great player but we are all getting significantly better. I suspect Katie is somewhat of a pool shark, choking on her games for the first month and now she’s frequently holding the winning cue stick! The pool table makes a nice break and a way to rejuvenate the mind throughout the day.

Movie / TV quotes
This is a game every office plays and the rules are quite simple. Any opportunity you can, work in a movie or a TV quote into the conversation. While the more obvious quotes (office space, princess bride) ensure that everybody gets the gag, it isn’t as fun to come up with some obscure movie quote that only you get. But reciting an obscure line from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure or The X-Files (series or movie) can earn you extra points, especially if only one other person in the office gets it!

Say a Song
Okay, I made that name up… but it is a game we play… if you can call it a game. Here is how it works. The first requirement is that there must be music playing that the whole office listens to (not just you.) The object then is to use the words of the song that is currently playing in a sentence. And you actually have to be talking to somebody when you do it. The sentence can be nothing more than the song lyrics themselves or a slightly altered version of the lyrics to get tenses and pronouns correct, etc.

There are just a couple of rules:

1) What you say has to be a legitimate sentence that could be pulled off without the song playing regardless of how strange it may sound. Example Yesterday Ozzy was singing “No More Tears” while Jason and I played pool. So I calmly said to him that he has to promise me that when he loses there will be no more tears.

2) You say it just before (or as) those particular words are sung. If you do it right it’ll take a few seconds for anybody to realize that you were playing Say a Song with them. If you want bonus points, Say a Song in a legitimate work conversation. Example, the other day I was printing out some e-books and one at a time kept giving them to Katie to read. On the radio David Lee Roth was singing “Just Like Paradise.” As I placed the last book on her desk I timed it with the song and said, “I know what you’re thinking… You’re thinking that this must be just like living in paradise.” See how that works? Oh, and Katie could have earned “bonus points” if she had replied something along the lines of “… and I don’t want to go home.”

Give it a try, its fun.

So tell me about your favorite office games.