24 Virtual Christmas Games to Play on Zoom with Adults

Virtual Christmas games are the difference between a video call that feels like a party and a video call that feels like one more meeting. We know because we run them at scale: teambuilding.com has hosted 6,000+ virtual holiday parties for clients like Apple, Amazon, and Google as of August 2026, and December is our single busiest month of the year.

This guide collects 24 virtual Christmas games that actually work on a video call — each with real instructions, timing, and the lessons our hosts have learned running these games with thousands of teams. You will find hosted options ranked by real survey data, games built for work teams, and free online Christmas games for adults that need zero budget and zero prep.

This list includes:

1. What are virtual Christmas games?
2. Hosted Christmas Zoom games, ranked by real survey data
3. Virtual Christmas party games for work
4. Free online Christmas games for adults
5. What we've learned from 6,000+ virtual holiday parties
6. Virtual Christmas games we don't recommend

What are virtual Christmas games?

Virtual Christmas games are holiday challenges that teams play together on video calls — for example, Jingle Mingle Bingo, Holiday Trivia, and Winter Minute to Win It. The purpose of these games is to engage a remote group and add real holiday cheer to virtual Christmas parties or end-of-year meetings. These activities are also called "online Christmas games," "Christmas Zoom games," "virtual Christmas party games," and "interactive Christmas games."

Virtual Christmas games are a subcategory of virtual party games and the online version of Christmas games for work. They are a type of Zoom game and a staple of virtual holiday parties, similar to virtual Christmas party ideas, Christmas trivia, and virtual Secret Santa. You can also use them as quick virtual holiday team building during regular December meetings, borrow from hybrid Christmas ideas if the team is split, or from our in-person office Christmas party guide if part of your team celebrates together in a room. Within the category, this guide includes hosted Christmas Zoom games, virtual Christmas party games for work, and free online Christmas games for adults.

Every game on this list works on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or Webex — the mechanics only need a camera, a chat box, and occasionally breakout rooms. About 85% of the hosted virtual events planned through our advisors run on Zoom, with the remainder split across Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Webex, so we note the relevant platform features as they come up.

And the games themselves are worth taking seriously: in a 2017 Journal of Neuroscience brain-imaging study, Manninen and colleagues found that 30 minutes of social laughter triggered endogenous opioid release in brain regions linked to pleasure and social bonding — laughter is a neurochemical pathway for forming social bonds, which is exactly what a distributed team is missing in December.

Hosted virtual Christmas games, ranked by real survey data

If you would rather play than emcee, bring in a professional host. We have run 34,000+ virtual team experiences on Zoom as of August 2026, and we rank our own events with the Team Building Score — a nightly points total built from confirmed bookings, verified reviews, ratings, and post-event survey outcomes. Here are our top virtual holiday games by that score:

Browse all hosted virtual events. Two holiday favorites from that list:

1. Virtual Holiday Party

Learn more→

Virtual Holiday Party

The world's #1 virtual holiday party since 2020.

Virtual90 min$40 pp 5.0(9,189)

Our flagship Virtual Holiday Party is a 90-minute, fully hosted event that strings the best of this list together for you: icebreakers, holiday trivia, and fast-paced games led by an expert host, so nobody on your team has to run the show. The event runs on Zoom, and we also support Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex, and other platforms.

Learn more about the Virtual Holiday Party.

Best for: Teams of 10–100+ who want zero planning stress
Time: 90 minutes
Materials: None — the host brings everything

2. Ultimate Holiday Game Show

Learn more→

Ultimate Holiday Game Show

Your favorite game show but with a holiday spin.

Virtual90 min$40 pp 5.0(2,263)

Ultimate Holiday Game Show turns your party into a festive TV-style competition: teams face off in rapid rounds of holiday trivia, guessing games, and challenges, with a professional host keeping score and the energy high. It is the format we reach for when a group wants maximum competition with zero prep.

Learn more about the Ultimate Holiday Game Show.

Best for: Competitive teams of 8–200
Time: 60–90 minutes
Materials: None — the host brings everything

Virtual Christmas games for work

These are the games we would actually run at a work party — team formats that use breakout rooms, screen share, and a scoreboard. Here is the lineup with a quick setup guide for each:

#	Game	Group size	Time
3	Jingle Mingle Bingo	10–100+	20–30 min
4	Holiday Trivia	Any, in teams	30–45 min
5	Holiday Feud	8–40	30–45 min
6	Seasonal Scavenger Hunt	5–50	15–45 min
7	Winter Minute to Win It	5–30	30–45 min
8	Holiday Draw It	6–30	20–30 min
9	Santa's Workshop	Teams of 3–6	30–45 min
10	Awkward Family Christmas Card	Teams of 3–6	20–30 min
11	Rich Kid Christmas	Any, in teams	20–30 min
12	Babes in Toyland	5–30	15–30 min
13	Virtual Secret Santa	5–50	30–60 min
14	White Elephant Exchange	5–20	30–60 min

3. Jingle Mingle Bingo

Jingle Mingle Bingo is one of the best virtual Christmas party games for big groups, because everyone plays at once and quieter teammates join without ever taking the spotlight.

To play:

1. Give each player a link to a holiday Bingo card — squares are prompts like "has regifted a present" or "still believes in Santa."
2. Split the group into breakout rooms of four to six people, and have players mingle to find teammates who match each square.
3. The first player to mark five boxes in a row and return to the main room wins.

You can also play in the main room: participants take turns sharing a Christmas-y fact about themselves while everyone marks matching squares. We made a free online Christmas Bingo generator you can use for your game:

For similar games, check out virtual holiday party Bingo.

Best for: Large groups, 10–100+
Time: 20–30 minutes
Materials: Bingo cards (free with the generator above)

4. Holiday Trivia

Holiday Trivia is the most reliable virtual Christmas game for work — every team has trivia fans, and the format runs equally well on Zoom, Teams, or Meet.

To play, prepare 20 to 30 questions across categories like:

• Holiday music
• Christmas movies
• Traditions around the world
• Winter weather and wildlife
• Holiday food

Split the group into teams with festive names — "the Noel-It-Alls" sets the tone — and either send teams to breakout rooms with an answer form, run a Kahoot quiz players answer on their phones, or have teams "buzz in" by typing a symbol in the chat. Multimedia rounds play especially well on video calls: name-that-tune audio clips, ultra-zoomed-in photos of holiday objects, or short film clips to identify.

What we've learned: include other wintertime holidays and neutral categories like "winter weather" so the game reflects the whole team, not just one tradition.

Here is a list of Christmas trivia questions and a guide to running virtual trivia.

Best for: Any group, teams of 4–8
Time: 30–45 minutes
Materials: Question list; optionally Kahoot (free)

5. Holiday Feud

Holiday Feud is a survey-style game show we run as a hosted event, and the DIY version is one of the best-kept secrets in virtual party planning — because the answers come from your own coworkers.

To play:

1. A week before the party, send the team a short anonymous survey: "Name a holiday song you secretly hate," "Name something that always goes wrong at office parties," "Name a gift you pretend to like."
2. Tally the answers into ranked boards, Family Feud style.
3. At the party, split into two teams. Each round, teams take turns guessing the top answers; strikes pass control to the other side.

The reveal moments are the magic: the room erupts when "Wonderful Christmastime" turns out to be the #1 secretly hated song at your own company.

Best for: Teams of 8–40
Time: 30–45 minutes (plus a 5-minute survey beforehand)
Materials: A survey form and a slide per board

6. Seasonal Scavenger Hunt

Seasonal scavenger hunts get people out of their chairs, which makes them the best mid-party energizer on this list. There are two formats we use constantly:

Lightning rounds: the host calls out one item at a time — "something red," "an ornament," "the mug you're actually drinking from" — and the last player back on camera with the item is out (or the first player back scores a point). Rounds take under a minute each, so this format works as a repeating segment between other games. Here is our full guide to lightning scavenger hunts.

Photo hunts: split the group into breakout-room teams and give each team ten minutes to find or stage photos from a prompt list — "recreate a scene from a holiday movie," "most impressive tree." Teams share their screens back in the main room, and the group votes a winner per category.

Check out this collection of holiday scavenger hunt ideas for prompt lists.

Best for: Energizing any group, 5–50
Time: 15–45 minutes
Materials: None — players use what's around them

7. Winter Minute to Win It

Winter Minute to Win It games are sixty-second physical challenges with a holiday twist — short, loud, and perfect for video because every player is framed in their own tile.

Favorites that work on camera:

• Fondly, Frostbitten — wear mittens (or oven mitts) and type a holiday phrase; first accurate message in the chat wins.
• Snowball B-ball — crumple a paper "snowball," stand three feet from a mug, and sink as many shots as possible in a minute.
• Christmas Cookie Face — walk a cookie from forehead to mouth without hands.
• Cane Hang — hang as many candy canes as possible on your face and ears.
• Bundle Up — put on as many layers of clothing as possible in sixty seconds.

Have players gather supplies before the party starts, run each challenge with a shared on-screen timer, and keep a scoreboard. Check out more virtual Minute to Win It games.

Best for: High-energy groups, 5–30
Time: 30–45 minutes
Materials: Household props players already own

8. Holiday Draw It

Holiday Draw It is our virtual take on Pictionary, and it needs nothing but the whiteboard built into Zoom, Teams, or Meet.

To play, split into teams and give one player per round a secret holiday prompt — "sledding accident," "regifted fruitcake," "office party photocopier incident." The artist has 60 seconds to draw while teammates shout guesses; no letters or numbers allowed. For a harder variant, try blind drawing: one player describes a holiday image only they can see while a teammate draws it sight unseen.

What we've learned: blind drawing is much harder than it sounds — describers explain what they already know the image looks like rather than what the artist actually needs to hear, which is exactly the communication gap that makes the debrief funny and useful.

Best for: Teams of 3–6, up to 30 players
Time: 20–30 minutes
Materials: Built-in whiteboard, prompt list

9. Santa's Workshop

Santa's Workshop is a holiday take on "Shark Tank" and the most creative team game on this list. Split the group into breakout-room teams of elves, and give each team seven minutes to invent the toy of the season — a name, a sketch on the shared whiteboard, and a 60-second pitch. Back in the main room, teams pitch a judging panel of Santa, Mrs. Claus, and the Head Elf (three good-humored executives work nicely), who greenlight one toy as the "hit of the season."

Score bonus points for teams that give every member a speaking part in the pitch.

Best for: Creative teams of 3–6, up to 30 players
Time: 30–45 minutes
Materials: Breakout rooms and a whiteboard

10. Awkward Family Christmas Card

Awkward Family Christmas Card is one of the most distinctive virtual Christmas games for work — and the results tend to get shared in the company chat for weeks.

To run it, split the group into breakout rooms and give each team ten minutes to compose the most awkward holiday card possible using the whiteboard feature: stiff poses, matching sweaters drawn onto stick figures, an uncomfortable caption in curly script. Give a one-minute warning so teams can screenshot before rooms close, then share the cards in the main room and vote for a winner.

Pro tip: teams that pose themselves on camera for a "photo" and annotate over the screenshot produce the best cards.

Best for: Teams of 3–6, up to 30 players
Time: 20–30 minutes
Materials: Whiteboard or annotation tool

11. Rich Kid Christmas

Rich Kid Christmas is an online holiday version of The Price is Right. Gather photos of extravagant items — a diamond-studded ornament set, a private sleigh ride, a collector's-edition toy — and share your screen one item at a time. Teams guess the price without going over; closest guess takes the round.

Pro tip: mix well-known items with true oddballs. The more obscure the item, the more entertaining the guesses — but include a few gettable ones so the group is not totally stumped.

Here are more virtual game show ideas.

Best for: Any group, in teams
Time: 20–30 minutes
Materials: A slideshow of priced items

12. Babes in Toyland

Babes in Toyland is a guessing game where teammates try to match childhood Christmas photos to coworkers. Before the party, attendees privately send the host a photo of themselves as a kid at the holidays. The host compiles a slideshow, and the group guesses who's who, with a point for each correct match.

No photos on hand? Run the survey variant: collect anonymous answers to prompts like "the best gift you ever received" or "your most embarrassing holiday moment," read them aloud, and have players guess the author.

What we've learned: toddler photos work much better than newborn photos, because recognizable features have started to develop — and the game gets more challenging (and better) as the group gets larger.

Best for: Teams of 5–30 who know each other a little
Time: 15–30 minutes
Materials: Photo submissions and a slideshow

13. Virtual Secret Santa

Secret Santa remains one of the most popular virtual Christmas traditions, and running it remotely is easier than in an office. Have participants sign up on a matching platform like Elfster, set a budget — $25 or less keeps it comfortable for everyone — and have gifts shipped directly to recipients. Then open presents together on the call, one at a time, while the group guesses each gift's sender.

Pro tip: keep participation opt-in and run the unwrapping as a segment of a longer party rather than the whole event — fifteen people opening boxes in sequence needs pacing.

Check out the full guide to virtual Secret Santa.

Best for: Teams of 5–50
Time: 30–60 minutes on the call
Materials: A matching platform and a gift budget

14. White Elephant Exchange

White Elephant is the gift exchange for teams that find Secret Santa too sincere — participants give gag gifts, and the stealing is the game. To run it virtually, have players send the host a photo of their wrapped (or unwrapped) gift, assign each a number, and reveal them one at a time on a shared slideshow. Each player in turn either claims an unopened number or steals a revealed gift; a gift stolen twice is locked. After the party, players mail their gifts to the final owners.

If the stealing logistics feel heavy, simplify: everyone buys a wacky gift for an assigned teammate and the group votes for the best (and worst) present.

Check out the full guide to virtual White Elephant exchanges.

Best for: Teams of 5–20
Time: 30–60 minutes
Materials: Gag gifts, a slideshow, postage for winners

Free online Christmas games for adults

Every game in this section is free, needs no materials, and can start within two minutes of someone suggesting it — which makes these the right picks for the last twenty minutes of a December team meeting or a casual holiday hangout. Here is the quick list:

#	Game	Group size	Time
15	Holiday This or That	Any	10–15 min
16	The Naughty List	5–50	10–15 min
17	Never Have I Ever: Christmas Edition	5–20	15–25 min
18	Camera Roll Christmas	5–30	15–20 min
19	Christmas Movie Charades	Teams of 4–10	20–30 min
20	Holiday Plot or Not	Any	15–20 min
21	Misheard Christmas Carols	Any	15–20 min
22	Holiday Hangman	Any	10–20 min
23	Christmas Mad Libs	Teams of 3–6	15–25 min
24	Holiday Icebreaker Questions	Any	5–15 min

15. Holiday This or That

Holiday This or That is the easiest virtual Christmas game for large groups: the leader reads a pair of options, and everyone answers at once using reactions, the chat, or a quick poll.

Starter prompts:

• Real tree or fake tree?
• Gingerbread or sugar cookies?
• Christmas Eve or Christmas morning?
• Caroling or looking at lights?
• Elves or reindeer?
• Angel tree topper or star tree topper?

What we've learned: close votes are the most fun — a 52/48 split creates suspense and debate, while a 95/5 split does not. Test your prompts on a couple of coworkers first and keep the divisive ones.

Here is a full list of This or That questions.

Best for: Any group, including 100+
Time: 10–15 minutes
Materials: None

16. The Naughty List

The Naughty List is a camera-based elimination game that gets players to fess up to holiday misdeeds. Everyone starts with cameras on. The leader reads a series of "naughty" deeds, and players who are guilty must turn their cameras off. The last players left on screen make the "nice list" and win a prize.

Starter prompts:

• Gifted someone an item I got for free.
• Pretended to be asleep to avoid shoveling snow.
• Snooped and ruined a Christmas surprise.
• Raided someone else's candy stash.
• Watched a show during the workday.
• Privately messaged a coworker mid-meeting about an unrelated topic.

Keep prompts light and work-safe — the game should feel like a confession booth for jaywalkers, not an HR case. Cameras clicking off in waves is reliably one of the biggest laughs of the party.

Best for: Groups of 5–50
Time: 10–15 minutes
Materials: None

17. Never Have I Ever: Christmas Edition

Never Have I Ever: Christmas Edition is a fingers-up icebreaker that surfaces great stories. Each player holds up ten fingers, or "reindeer antlers." Players take turns making statements starting with "Never have I ever…," and anyone guilty lowers a finger. The game ends when one player remains, or after a set number of rounds.

Starter prompts:

• Never have I ever regifted a present.
• Never have I ever snuck one of Santa's cookies.
• Never have I ever spent Christmas in an airport.
• Never have I ever lied about a present being delayed in the mail.
• Never have I ever given a December birthday one present for both occasions.
• Never have I ever eaten a whole bowl of cookie dough.

Pro tip: pause on the best reveals — "wait, tell that story" is where the game earns its spot.

Here is a list of Never Have I Ever questions for work.

Best for: Groups of 5–20
Time: 15–25 minutes
Materials: None

18. Camera Roll Christmas

Camera Roll Christmas turns the phones everyone is holding anyway into the game. The host calls out a prompt, and players race to find a matching photo on their phone and hold it up to the camera — or drop it in the chat.

Prompts that work:

• Your most festive photo from any December
• A holiday meal you're proud of
• The best snow photo on your phone
• A pet being festive (or refusing to be)
• Your worst holiday selfie

Give 60 seconds per prompt, then let a few volunteers tell the story behind their photo. The storytelling is the point — the photos are just the excuse.

Best for: Groups of 5–30
Time: 15–20 minutes
Materials: None — players use their phones

19. Christmas Movie Charades

Christmas Movie Charades is the classic, and it transfers to video calls surprisingly well because every actor gets a full-screen stage. Split into teams, then have one member at a time act out a holiday film — or a scene from one — while their team guesses within two minutes. No words, no mouthing, no props with writing.

Spotlighting the actor (pin or spotlight their video) makes the round feel like theater. You can pull titles from a hat or use our free charades generator.

Best for: Teams of 4–10
Time: 20–30 minutes
Materials: None

20. Holiday Plot or Not

Holiday Plot or Not is a bluffing game about the strange world of Christmas movies. The leader reads plot summaries, and the group votes on whether each film actually exists — via poll, reactions, or chat.

Examples to start with:

1. A baker competing in a holiday bake-off swaps identities with an identical princess. (Plot! The Princess Switch)
2. An accidentally abandoned child foils a plot to burglarize a toy store. (Plot! Home Alone 2)
3. A brother convinces his concussed sister that Christmas does not exist. (Not!)
4. Two women find love after switching houses for the holidays. (Plot! The Holiday)
5. A documentary about the after-hours lives of five department store Santas. (Not!)

Writing your own is half the fun: real made-for-TV Christmas plots are so strange that the fakes barely need exaggerating.

Best for: Any group
Time: 15–20 minutes
Materials: A list of real and fake plots

21. Misheard Christmas Carols

Misheard Christmas Carols is a wordplay game where players decode garbled lyrics into real songs. The leader shares a card with a misheard line, and the first player to name the carol — out loud or in the chat — scores a point.

Examples:

• Phil is not my dad. (Feliz Navidad)
• Decks and halls without a hobby. (Deck the Halls)
• Eyesore mummy case in sand. (I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus)
• Owl, tall — ow! knife! — battle them! (O Little Town of Bethlehem)

For a creative second half, send teams to breakout rooms to write their own misheard lyric, then vote on the funniest back in the main room.

Best for: Any group
Time: 15–20 minutes
Materials: A few prepared lyric cards

22. Holiday Hangman

Holiday Hangman is the zero-prep word game your team already knows how to play. Share a slide or whiteboard with blank spaces for a festive phrase — carols, movie titles, holiday foods — and let the group call out letters. Wrong guesses build the drawing; if traditional hangman feels grim for the season, draw a snowman piece by piece instead.

Rotate the puzzle-master role so several people get to host a round. Here are more word games for adults.

Best for: Any group
Time: 10–20 minutes
Materials: Whiteboard or annotation tool

23. Christmas Mad Libs

Christmas Mad Libs produces the most quotable lines of any game on this list. Send teams into breakout rooms with a list of word types to fill — noun, celebrity, body part, verb ending in -ing — then return to the main room and read the words into a holiday story template: a letter to Santa, a company holiday memo, or "'Twas the Night Before the All-Hands."

To make your own templates, take any short holiday story or carol and blank out the most load-bearing words. The more corporate the template, the funnier the result.

Best for: Teams of 3–6
Time: 15–25 minutes
Materials: A story template per round

24. Holiday Icebreaker Questions

Sometimes the best game is a good question. Holiday icebreakers work as a warm-up segment at the start of a party, or as a standing December ritual in weekly meetings. Favorites include "What is the best gift you ever received?", "What is your family's strangest holiday tradition?", and "What age were you when you figured out Santa?"

We made a free holiday icebreaker generator — spin it on screen and answer whatever comes up:

For more prompts, here is our list of Christmas icebreaker questions.

Best for: Any group; great for meetings
Time: 5–15 minutes
Materials: None

What we've learned from 6,000+ virtual holiday parties

Virtual holiday parties are our home turf — the format we have run more than any other. The lessons below come from thousands of December Zoom rooms:

Book early — the calendar is the real competition. With a third of the year's virtual events packed into a few December weeks, the best hosts and time slots go first, and your own team's calendars fill even faster than ours do. Lock a date by early November, and favor mid-afternoon slots that respect time zones. There is no rule the party must happen in December at all: we hold our own internal company holiday party in February, when the team's schedules have room to actually enjoy it.

Structure beats a free-form hangout. An unstructured "virtual happy hour" reliably dies after twenty minutes of talking over each other. The parties people rave about have a spine: an icebreaker, two or three games from this list, and a defined ending. When Forbes published its remote holiday party playbook featuring our team, "choose a structure" was the first tip we gave — it is the one that rescues every other decision.

The laughter is doing real work. In a 2014 Journal of Applied Psychology study of 54 videotaped real team meetings, Lehmann-Willenbrock and Allen found that patterns of humor and laughter — humor sequences, not isolated jokes — were positively related to team performance both immediately and roughly two years later. A silly game in December is not a distraction from teamwork; it is a rehearsal for it.

Fifteen people is the dividing line. In our experience, roughly 15 participants is where a Zoom event changes character: below it, you can run personal, high-touch rounds where everyone speaks; above it, you need breakout rooms, team formats, and structured hosting. Pick your games accordingly — Bingo, trivia, and Feud scale up; Never Have I Ever and icebreakers shine in small rooms.

Cameras on is a design outcome, not a policy. Ordering people to turn cameras on breeds resentment. Games do it automatically: nobody plays the Naughty List or lightning scavenger hunts with a black tile. Open with a game that rewards being seen, and the cameras take care of themselves.

Keep participation visibly optional. Gift exchanges, childhood photos, and camera games should all be opt-in, with graceful ways to watch a round. The fastest way to lose a remote room is to force someone on stage — the second fastest is to let the same three extroverts run every round.

Virtual Christmas games we don't recommend

A few formats sound festive and reliably fall flat on a video call. Having watched thousands of December Zoom rooms, here is what we would skip:

Idea	Why skip it	Verdict
Virtual happy hour with no agenda	Twenty minutes of crosstalk, then silence. Alcohol is not a format — anchor the call with two or three games first.	Add structure
Forced solo performances	Making individuals sing carols or perform to a grid of muted faces is anxiety, not cheer. Keep performances volunteer-only.	Skip it
Games that require everyone to buy supplies	Mandatory purchases tax your lowest-paid teammates. Every DIY game on this list uses items people already own.	Skip it
Marathon trivia (50+ questions)	Trivia peaks around 30 minutes on a video call. Past that, cameras drift off. Cut your question list in half.	Trim it
Elimination games that idle the losers	Eliminated-in-round-one players will check email for the rest of the call. Use point systems so everyone plays every round.	Rework it
Surprise embarrassing slideshows	Photos nobody approved, screen-shared to the whole company, age terribly. Get consent for every photo you show.	Skip it

Final Thoughts

A virtual Christmas party lives or dies on its games. Pick two or three from this list, put someone (or one of our hosts) clearly in charge, keep every activity opt-in, and end five minutes before people expect — a remote party that leaves the team wanting more is the one they will still mention in March.

Next, check out this list of Christmas team building ideas, these hybrid Christmas party ideas for mixed remote and in-office teams, and these online games for families to keep the fun going after work.