Team-based recreational activities for adults that are fun even with large groups
When you’re organizing company events like parties, in-house sports days, or welcome gatherings for new employees, it’s common to include some kind of recreation, right?
If it’s something you can do in teams, it builds a stronger sense of unity and makes it more fun for everyone.
Plus, offering prizes to the winning team can really liven things up, and at welcome parties it can be a great way to break the ice with people you’re meeting for the first time.
In this article, we’ll introduce a variety of team-based recreational activities that adults can enjoy!
They vary in how long they take, and some require very little preparation.
Choose the ones that best fit your event’s situation.
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Adult-oriented team competition recreation activities (11–20) that are fun even for large groups
Gesture Game
Let’s play a classic recreation game that everyone from kids to adults can enjoy: charades! Prepare paper and a pen and write down prompts.
Make sure only the person acting can see the prompt.
The actor must convey the prompt using gestures only—no talking allowed! Once the prompt is correctly guessed, switch to a new actor.
Try playing in teams and compete to see how many prompts each team can guess.
It also gets more exciting if you add your own rules, like how many passes are allowed.
Birthday line
It’s a game where you derive answers using only gestures, helping build participants’ trust and understanding.
Express your birthday through gestures and line everyone up in order of their birthdays.
Since numbers can be shown with hand shapes, conveying your birthday itself should be fairly easy.
We recommend setting a time limit or competing by team speed to encourage smooth communication.
Once everyone gets used to gesturing, you can change the prompts—such as “height” or “the most expensive recent purchase”—to adjust the difficulty and keep things lively.
BlindSquare
Are you familiar with a recreational activity called “Blind Square”? It’s a game you can play with at least four people.
You place a rope formed into a circle on the ground at your feet, and everyone stands around it.
Then, everyone puts on a blindfold, picks up the rope at their feet, lifts it to chest height, and, while calling out to each other, tries to shape the rope into a perfect square.
It sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly difficult, and getting a clean square is quite a challenge.
Because it requires teamwork and cooperation, it’s also recommended as a team-building activity.
Junk Relay
Let me introduce a recreation activity called the Junk Relay.
Players split into teams and compete.
You set a start line and a finish line, and place about five items—such as stuffed animals or balls—at the start.
The game is to work together as a team to carry those items to the finish in order.
However, you can’t start carrying the next item until the previous one has been properly placed at the finish, and an item can’t be placed at the finish until every team member has touched it.
Before starting the game, teams hold a strategy meeting to decide how to carry the items as quickly as possible.
One letter per person game
Haven’t you seen this on quiz shows and the like? A question is asked, and you answer it one letter at a time, with each person providing one letter in order from the start.
If everyone answers correctly, the full correct answer naturally appears.
You do need to adjust the length of the answer depending on the number of people, but how about trying it as a team game or taking turns answering for fun? Have each person hold a sketchbook and a pen, write one letter of the answer, and then reveal your letters all together on the count of three!
English Telephone Game
Are you all good at English? This game is a twist on the classic recreation activity, the telephone game—we’re going to play it in English.
You pass along short everyday conversations at about the level you learn in middle school and see if the message reaches the last person correctly.
Even if they’re simple daily phrases, listening and pronunciation are tricky, so the odds of conveying them accurately seem pretty low… (lol).
And having the last person translate what they heard back into Japanese and present it only adds more room for misunderstanding.
After it’s over, we’ll go back through the order and figure out where things went wrong—let’s find the culprit (lol).
Portrait-guessing quiz
Is everyone good at drawing? If you are, then a drawing game won’t be a problem, but for those who aren’t, this recreation activity might be tough: the “Portrait Guessing Quiz.” You draw a portrait of someone on your team or on the opposing team, and everyone tries to guess who it is.
You could also make the rule to draw famous people and guess them—that would be exciting too.
It’s an easy game to organize even with a large group, since you can split into teams.
Team-based fast-response quiz
Haven’t you often seen this on TV variety shows? It’s a fast-answer quiz where you buzz in and respond even before the question is finished being read.
You’ll need to prepare buzzers, but these days there are dedicated ones for sale.
Just having them really sets the mood and guarantees excitement.
If you can’t get enough for everyone, you can make it a team competition with a team-versus-team fast-answer quiz.
For wrong answers, prepare a one-turn timeout or a penalty game!
How many people can fit? game
A game to see how many people can get onto a prepared platform.
If you just keep hopping on without thinking, the platform will quickly fill up.
So before getting on, do a rehearsal, discuss the details, and devise strategies—try smart and efficient ways of getting on.
If you have enough space, run it with several teams at once, and play with the rule that the team that manages to get the most people onto the platform within the time limit wins.
Illustration Telephone Game
It’s a game that tests members’ ability to communicate and understand each other—both the willingness to convey your message and the skill to grasp what others want to express.
Players depict a given prompt through a drawing; the next person interprets the prompt from that drawing and then passes it along with their own drawing to the next participant, and so on.
The final person states, in words, what they believe the original prompt was, and everyone enjoys seeing whether they got it right.
If the group reaches the correct answer, you can feel a strong sense of unity; even if they don’t, it’s fun to analyze how the meaning shifted along the way.
The ability to capture distinctive features and one’s drawing skills are also part of what makes this game enjoyable.