Team Game Nights at Work: How Interns Should Show Up

Three weeks into one summer cohort I managed, the team lead booked a Thursday evening of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and pizza in the big meeting room. Eleven of our fourteen interns came. Two of them left that evening with a noticeably better standing in the office than they walked in with, and one left with a worse one. None of it had anything to do with who finished first.

Team game nights, Jackbox sessions on a video call, a lunchtime chess board in the kitchen: these are now a normal part of how many offices try to bond a group. For an intern they are also one of the few unstructured moments where senior people see you outside of a task. Nobody explains the unwritten rules, so here are the ones I watched play out across two agencies and roughly seven intern intakes.

Why these evenings carry more weight than they should

Managers form impressions of interns from a very small sample. In a ten-week placement, your supervisor might see your actual work in detail perhaps a dozen times. A two-hour social is a large share of the remaining exposure, and it is the only part where people judge character without reference to output.

That is not entirely fair, but it is how memory works. When I wrote end-of-placement notes, the moments I remembered clearly were often small social ones. The intern who stayed behind to help stack chairs after a quiz night got a sentence in her reference. The intern who spent the same night correcting colleagues on trivia answers got a sentence too, a less useful one.

The behaviours I saw help, and the ones that hurt

The two interns who did well at that Mario Kart night did different things. One was clearly good at the game and spent most of the evening pairing herself with the least confident players, explaining the controls and laughing off her own losses. The other had never played, said so cheerfully, and asked the operations manager to show him how drifting worked. He got the manager talking for ten minutes about her own college dorm tournaments.

The intern who lost ground was the best player in the room. He won every cup, narrated each blue shell, and at one point told a senior designer she was "holding the controller wrong". He was not malicious. He simply treated the night as a competition, when everyone else in the room understood it as a chance to talk.

From that and similar evenings, a short list of what tends to land well:

• Introducing yourself to at least two people outside your own team, ideally before the game starts.
• Volunteering for a small logistics job: setting up the screen, collecting pizza orders, keeping score in a Codenames round.
• Asking someone senior to teach you something about the game. People like explaining things they are good at.
• Leaving at a sensible point, rather than being the very first or the very last person out the door.

Should you go easy on purpose?

A common piece of advice is to lose deliberately against your manager. I think this is mostly wrong, and it is the question I get asked most.

People notice sandbagging more often than you would expect, especially in games like Codenames or Gartic Phone where effort shows. Being caught letting someone win reads as either condescending or anxious, and neither helps you. What I recommend instead is playing normally while making the game pleasant for others: be generous about mistakes, avoid commentary on other players' skill, and put more energy into the conversation between rounds than into the scoreboard.

If you are much better than everyone else, the gracious move is to offer handicaps openly. "I'll play with the random character" or "I'll use the wheel controller" is honest, slightly funny, and keeps it fair. That is a very different signal from secretly throwing a match.

Remote and hybrid versions

Online sessions bring their own small traps. On a call with Jackbox, skribbl.io or a shared Kahoot quiz, your camera and audio carry most of your presence. A few specifics I have seen matter:

Turn your camera on if most people have theirs on. Mute when you are not talking, because keyboard clatter during a drawing round is genuinely annoying. Keep your display name as your real name, not your gaming handle; three of our interns once joined a company quiz as "xXSlayerXx" and variations, and the head of the department spent the evening asking who they were.

Be careful with anything you type into a shared game. Jackbox prompts like Quiplash ask for jokes, and a joke that works in your group chat may land very differently in front of a client services director. When in doubt, go silly rather than edgy.

What to do if you do not want to go

Not everyone enjoys games, and not everyone can stay late. Skipping one social is fine. Skipping every one, without explanation, tends to be read as disinterest, even when the reason is a second job or caring duties. A short note to your manager, something like "I can't make Thursday evenings because of my commute, but I'd love to join the lunch quiz", solves most of this. Our guide on networking at company events when you are new has more ways to be visible without forcing it, and the early weeks in general are covered in your first week as an intern.

The score is forgotten by Monday. Whether you made the new person feel welcome is not.

A small job for this week

Look at your team calendar or Slack channel for the next social event, game-based or not, and put it in your diary now. Before it starts, pick two people you have not spoken to properly and decide on one question to ask each of them. That is the whole plan. If the event involves a game, you can find more on how play builds working relationships in our games section.