Make My Jeopardy

Jeopardy for team building

Most team building activities fail the same way — they ask people to be vulnerable with colleagues before they are ready. A trivia board asks nothing of anyone except that they know something, and the good version of it is built about the team rather than about general knowledge, which is where the actual bonding happens.

Building a board about your team

  1. Make the categories about the team, not the world

    "Capital Cities" is a pub quiz. "Whose Desk Is This", "First Week Stories", "Our Worst Outage" and "Who Said It In Standup" are a team building game. The first rewards whoever reads a lot; the second rewards paying attention to each other.

  2. Collect the material before you write it

    Ask everyone for two facts about themselves in a thread a week ahead. This is the whole job — with the facts in hand the board writes itself, and without them you will end up back at general knowledge.

  3. Mix the teams across the org chart

    Deliberately split people who sit together. A board about the team is only a bonding exercise if answering requires asking someone you do not normally talk to.

  4. Keep one category everyone can win

    One category on something universal — the year everyone joined, the office, a shared project. It gives newer people somewhere to score, which is what stops them from disengaging in the first five minutes.

  5. Play it in half an hour

    Four categories, five clues, and Final Jeopardy. Long enough to get competitive, short enough that nobody checks their laptop.

What makes it work

  • Nobody is put on the spot alone. Teams confer, so a quiet person contributes without having to perform.
  • New joiners have a way in. A category about the company's own history gives them something to ask about rather than something to fail at.
  • It ends cleanly. Final Jeopardy gives a last-place team a real chance, so the game finishes with everyone still playing.
  • It costs nothing and takes no setup. Everyone buzzes from the phone in their pocket, with no app to install before the session starts.

The two things to avoid

Clues that single out one person's private life. "Who has three cats" is fine if they offered it; anything they did not volunteer is not yours to put on a screen. Collecting facts in advance is what keeps this line clear — everything on the board was submitted by the person it is about.

And tenure-weighted categories with no counterweight. If every category rewards having been there five years, the people you most wanted to include are the ones who spend the game watching.

Cost

Free for a full board with buzzers, live scoring and Final Jeopardy, with no account. Pro is $10 a year and adds image and video clues — which is what you want for a "whose desk is this" round — along with AI drafting, spreadsheet import, larger boards and private boards.

Ready-made boards for work

Copy any of them into your own editor and change what you like — free, no account.

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Common questions

How long does a team building Jeopardy game take?

About twenty minutes for four categories, or 35 to 50 for a full 6 × 5 with Final Jeopardy. Twenty minutes is usually the right length when it is one item on a longer agenda.

What categories work for a team game?

Ones about the team: first-week stories, who said it in standup, company history, photos of desks or pets that people submitted themselves. General knowledge categories turn it into a pub quiz, which is a different and less useful activity.

Can we use photos in the clues?

Yes, with Pro, which adds image and video clues. That is what makes a "whose desk is this" or "guess the baby photo" round possible.

Does it work if half the team is remote?

Yes. Share the board over the call and everyone buzzes from their own phone, which keeps the buzz order off the video channel where latency would decide it.

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