Games to Play in a Meeting

Playing a game during a meeting is a small act of resistance against a meeting that did not need you in it. It is also, done badly, a genuinely rude thing to do to a colleague who is trying to get through an agenda. The difference is entirely in the execution.

What follows is three games and, more usefully, the rules for playing them without becoming the reason your team stops sharing screens.

The etiquette, first

This matters more than the games, so it goes first.

Never play in a meeting where someone is vulnerable. Performance conversations, redundancies, incident reviews, anything where a colleague is presenting work they are nervous about. The whole premise of a meeting game is that the meeting has surplus attention going spare. When it does not, there is no game.

Stay responsive. The one unbreakable rule. If you are asked a question and have to ask for it to be repeated, you have failed — not at the game, at the meeting. A game you can drop instantly is fine. A game that captures you is a liability, which is precisely why a bingo card beats anything with a timer.

Do not recruit the room. A shared card among three people generates visible reactions, and visible reactions are how this becomes a problem. Someone laughing at nothing during a budget review is conspicuous in a way that one quiet person is not.

Never at the presenter's expense. A card that fills up because a colleague has a verbal tic is not a game about corporate language, it is mockery with a scoreboard. Aim at the vocabulary, never the person.

Camera on means play less. Eye movement is legible on video in a way it is not in a room. If you are on camera and a named participant, the honest answer is that this is not the meeting for it.

Buzzword Bingo

The classic, and still the best-designed of the three for the actual constraints of a meeting: no timer, no urgency, no penalty for ignoring it for twenty minutes.

How to play. Generate a card. Each square holds a phrase. Tap one when you genuinely hear it. Five in a row wins, and the winning is beside the point.

Playing it well. The skill is calibration. A card of nothing but synergy and paradigm shift never fills, because nobody has said "paradigm shift" sincerely since about 2009. A card of quick call, circle back and bandwidth fills in eleven minutes and is equally dull. The good card sits at the edge of plausibility — phrases you would expect roughly once an hour. Aim for a card that completes near the end of a long meeting and not before.

Strictness rules. Decide before you start whether "circling back" counts for circle back. Loose matching makes any card fill; strict matching makes most cards dead. The usual convention is that the root phrase counts in any tense but a different phrase does not — circling back yes, back around to no.

Where it comes from. Bingo cards adapted to speech long predate the internet; the corporate version circulated widely on office networks through the 1990s and got a boost from a 1998 Dilbert strip. Its endurance says something slightly bleak about how little the vocabulary has moved in thirty years.

Jargonle

A daily word game on a five-letter piece of corporate jargon. Six guesses, one puzzle per day, same puzzle for everyone.

Why it suits a meeting. It is bounded. One puzzle, a few minutes, then it is over and cannot expand to fill the hour. That makes it the safest of the three for a meeting where you might be called on — you can finish it in the first ten minutes and be fully present afterwards, which is a materially different proposition from a game that runs the whole call.

Playing it well. Standard word-game strategy mostly holds: open with a guess rich in common vowels and consonants rather than a hunch. The wrinkle is that the answer set is drawn from business vocabulary, so the letter distribution is skewed — words like scope, agile, churn and defer are over-represented relative to ordinary English. Guessing a normal English word first is still correct; guessing a normal English word second is usually a wasted turn.

Hot Mic

A reaction test. You have been caught on an open microphone. Tap to mute as fast as you can.

The honest warning. This is the one game here you should not play during a meeting. It demands a burst of full attention at an unpredictable moment, which is the exact opposite of the property that makes bingo safe. It is here because it is funny and because the reflex it trains is real — it belongs to the five minutes before a call, not the middle of one.

What the scores mean. Simple visual reaction time for most adults falls in the region of 200–300 milliseconds, and that is reaction alone — the interval between seeing a change and beginning to move. Tapping a specific target adds movement time on top, so a score in the low 300s is a good result on a touchscreen and anything under 250 suggests you anticipated rather than reacted. Ageing slows it, caffeine sharpens it slightly, and fatigue blunts it more than most people expect.

The real lesson. No reaction time saves you from a hot mic, because by the time you know the mic is open the sentence has already left. The only reliable defense is muting by default and treating every call as live. The game is a joke about a problem that discipline solves and reflexes do not.