Play

A word game for remote team meetings

How to use ThoughtMatch as an icebreaker or team-building session over video calls: two timed formats, how to set it up from the meeting chat, words drawn from your team's work, and what the game shows about how your team communicates.

By Ansh R. Suryavanshi, creator of ThoughtMatch

Why it suits a meeting

ThoughtMatch is an online take on the party word game known as "Contact". One player, the Dener, hides a secret word and shows its first letter. Everyone else posts clues for other words that start with the revealed letters, the prefix. When someone thinks they know the word behind a clue, they press Contact! and type it. If every contacter wrote the clue giver's word, the Dener reveals the next letter. The Dener fights back by typing guesses to break clues first. The full rules are on how to play.

For a team, the useful part is that nobody wins a contact alone. Two or more people have to read the same clue and land on the same word, which is a small, low-stakes version of what a team does all day. It's also cooperative: everyone except the Dener is on one side.

Setting up from the meeting chat

One person, usually the facilitator, opens the site and creates a room. That person is the host. Then:

  1. Paste the room link into the meeting chat. The 6-character room code works too, for anyone who prefers typing it.
  2. Everyone opens it in a browser tab or on their phone and types a name. There are no accounts and nothing to install.
  3. Stay on the video call for the talking. The game has no voice chat of its own.

A room holds 3 to 12 players. For a larger meeting, use your video tool's breakout rooms and have one person in each breakout create a room. Someone who joins late can still come in mid-round as a player.

Tip: Players on a laptop can keep the call full-screen and play on their phone. Seeing faces while the clues fly is half the fun.

A 10-minute icebreaker

Good for the start of a weekly meeting, with four to eight people.

  1. Minute 0 to 1: paste the link and let people join.
  2. Minute 1 to 2: explain it in three sentences: "Give a clue for any word starting with the letters shown. Press Contact! if you know someone's word. We share three guesses at the secret word."
  3. Minute 2 to 10: play two rounds. In the lobby, choose 3 rounds, a 3-minute round timer and "take turns" for the next Dener. If you run short of time, end the game after the second round from the host controls (the crown button).

Go first as Dener with a word ready. The Dener has 45 seconds to choose, and a quick first round shows people how it works better than any explanation.

A 30-minute team session

For a team-building slot or the last half hour of an offsite day, with five to eight people.

  1. 0 to 3 minutes: join and settle in.
  2. 3 to 6 minutes: a practice round with the timer off, Dener played by someone who knows the game.
  3. 6 to 23 minutes: the main game: 5 rounds, a 3-minute timer, take turns. That's 15 minutes of play at most, plus a moment for each Dener to choose.
  4. 23 to 30 minutes: debrief. Ask: which clue landed instantly, and why? Which contact failed, and what did each person write? Did anything get flagged as an inside reference?

The debrief is what makes it team-building rather than just a game. The next sections give you things to talk about.

Choosing words around your work

Secret words drawn from the team's world make the game feel like yours. In the default Dictionary setting the secret has to be a real word of 4 to 15 letters, which still covers plenty of work vocabulary:

Jargon and compound terms like ROADMAP, STANDUP or ONBOARDING aren't dictionary words. The host can switch the Words setting to Any word, which accepts any word made of letters. The trade-off is that typos are accepted too, so a contact can fail on a spelling slip. More general advice on difficulty is in word ideas.

Avoid confidential project names and anything sensitive, like reorganisations. The point is a shared laugh, not a reminder of a hard week.

What the game reveals about your team

Clues work when the people reading them share the context the writer had in mind. In a team, that context is your work: the tools you use, the meetings you sit through, the things that went wrong together. Three patterns tend to show up.

Shared context lands. Omar is the Dener and picks RELEASE. The team sees R and six blank tiles. Kim posts RETRO with the clue "the meeting where we admit what went wrong". Two teammates press Contact! and type RETRO within seconds. Omar tries REVIEW and misses. The contact holds and the prefix becomes RE.

Kim's clue was easy for the people who attend that meeting and only a little harder for Omar, who had to name the exact word under the 10-second countdown.

Same clue, different pictures. In the next round Kim is the Dener, and the team sees a B. Jess posts BACKLOG with the clue "where unfinished work waits". Dev contacts with BACKLOG. Ana contacts with BOARD. The contact fails, and everyone, Kim included, sees both words. They're used up for the rest of the round.

Neither Ana nor Dev was wrong. They picture the same thing differently, because Ana works from the board view and Dev from the backlog list. A failed contact makes that kind of gap visible in a way that's funny rather than tense, and it's worth a minute in the debrief.

Inside references. In a later round the secret word starts with C. Sam posts COFFEE with the clue "what I spilled at the offsite". The Dener flags it with Inside reference?. The players who aren't involved get 20 seconds to vote. Most of them weren't at the offsite, so they vote inside reference and the clue is voided.

The vote tells you who shares a piece of context and who doesn't. If clues from one group keep getting flagged, newer or remote colleagues may be missing context the rest take for granted.

Inclusive across languages and time zones

Languages

Time zones

The game is live, so everyone has to be there at once. Use the short format in the overlap hour rather than keeping someone up late for a long one, and rotate which meeting hosts it. If a connection drops, the seat is held for about 20 seconds, so a reload puts the player back with their score.

Facilitation tips

For more ways to vary the game, such as themed rounds or team scoring, see house rules. If the session becomes a regular social, the game night guide covers longer evenings.

Teams that meet on Discord

ThoughtMatch also runs as a Discord Activity. In a voice channel, open Activities with the rocket button and start ThoughtMatch. Everyone in that Activity sits at the same table, with no room code to share and with their Discord pictures. The voice is already there, so it's the quickest set-up of all. The same 3 to 12 player range applies.

Try a round before your next meeting.

Start a free game