Free browser games to play with your team, no signup
Games that start in one click, work on a call, and never ask anybody to make an account.
The hard part of playing a game with a work team is almost never the game. It is that half the room has to make an account, one person cannot install anything because IT says so, someone is on a phone, and by the time everybody is in, the fifteen minutes you had are gone.
So the only filter that matters for this list is: can one person send a link, and can everyone else be playing within about twenty seconds? Everything below clears that bar. The games on this site do, and so do several things we do not make, which are listed further down with links, because if one of those is the better fit you should go and use it.
A word on what this site actually is, since the name suggests otherwise: Board for Teams is not board games. It is a set of short browser games - some solo daily puzzles, some live multiplayer rooms you join from a shared link. The multiplayer ones are what belong on this page.
What to play here
Whisper Chain
Online Drawing Telephone Party Game
The best thing here for a group of four or more. Draw a rumour, caption the drawing, watch it mutate down the chain, then read the whole thing back together. Runs alongside a video call: host puts the room on the shared screen, everyone else plays on their own device. The reveal exports as one image to paste into a channel afterwards.
Stroop Sprint
Stroop Effect Color Word Test
Sixteen rounds of naming the ink colour a word is printed in rather than the word itself. Takes four minutes, needs no explanation beyond one sentence, and is reliably funny because nobody is good at it. Up to eight players. Not a good choice if anyone in the group is colour blind.
Kityt
Reaction Time Game
A three minute reaction race for up to eight. The shortest thing here - the right call when a meeting ends early rather than when you have booked time for a game. Ends with a replay of everyone's run as kittens on an obstacle course.
Paint Mix
Daily Color Mixing Puzzle
Work out which of five pigments were mixed to make a colour. The multiplayer room races up to eight people through the same eight targets. More thinking and less reflex than the others, so it suits a group that wants to be clever rather than fast.
Blink Shift
Daily Spot the Difference Game
Memorise a grid, watch it blink, find what changed. Its Team mode hides several changes at once specifically so a group can call them out together around one shared screen. Nothing to join - it runs in a single tab.
Flip It
Memory Matching Game
Memory pairs on one screen, with a ten-miss budget instead of a timer so the group can argue about where the card was without being punished for it. Also single-tab, so screen-share it.
Tic Tac Toe
Play Online With a Friend
For two people and about a minute. Mostly useful as the fastest way to check that link-sharing works with a colleague before you start something longer.
Other free options worth knowing
This site does not cover everything, and some of these are better than anything here for specific groups. All of them are genuinely playable without a paid account.
skribbl.io
Free, ad-supported
The default free draw-and-guess game, and still the best one for a big group that wants competitive scoring with word choices. Private rooms via a link, no account. Ads are intrusive and the public rooms are unmoderated, so always create a private room for work.
Gartic Phone
Free, ad-supported
Drawing-telephone with a lot of game modes and a very polished album at the end. Everybody draws simultaneously in parallel chains, which is much faster than a single-chain game and means nobody waits - but also means nobody watches anybody else during the round.
Codenames (codenames.game)
Free
A free browser implementation of the word-association board game. The best team game on this whole page if you have twenty-five minutes and an even split of players, and the one to pick over anything here when you want actual strategy.
netgames.io
Free
A small hub of free browser party games - Codenames, Spyfall, Sketchful and others - all link-shared and account-free. Plain, unmonetised and reliable. Worth a bookmark.
Kahoot!
Freemium
The quiz platform everybody already recognises. Great for a large all-hands where one person builds the questions in advance; heavier than it is worth for five people on a Thursday, and the free tier is increasingly limited.
Water Cooler Trivia
Paid, free trial
Not a live game at all - it posts a weekly trivia round into Slack or Teams and scores it automatically. Solves a different problem to this page: asynchronous team fun for people in different timezones who will never be on a call together.
How to actually run one of these
Pick the length before you pick the game. A five minute gap wants Kityt or a round of Stroop Sprint; a booked half hour wants Whisper Chain or Codenames. The most common failure is starting a twenty minute game with eight minutes left.
Have the host share their screen for the room view and let everybody else play on their own device. Trying to run a multiplayer game entirely through one shared screen is what makes people disengage.
And send the link in the channel, not in the calendar invite. Whatever the game, the people who join are the ones who saw a link thirty seconds before it started.
Frequently asked questions
Do these really work without an account?
Every game on this site does - there is no signup anywhere, and a display name is stored only in your own browser. Of the external options, skribbl.io, Gartic Phone, Codenames and netgames.io need no account either; Kahoot needs one for the host only.
Will these work on a locked-down work laptop?
They are ordinary web pages, so there is nothing to install or approve. The live multiplayer games need a WebSocket connection, which some very strict corporate proxies block. If a room will not connect, the solo daily puzzles will still work.
How many people can play?
On this site, up to eight in Kityt, Stroop Sprint and Paint Mix, up to ten in Whisper Chain, and any number around a shared screen for Blink Shift and Flip It. For a group of thirty or more, Kahoot is the realistic answer.