Break-out Room Tag

This is a great warm-up to teach people how to move between breakout rooms.

Before the Game

The Zoom host will create breakout rooms and get ready to automatically assign people to rooms to kick off the game. Create 1 breakout room for 4-5 people on the call. Select that people can move between rooms. 

To Play

Invite someone to be '“it”. If it is a large group then ask a few people so 1 out of 10 participants start as "it". 

Once the game begins, the people who are “it” can tag someone by counting down from 10 and then say someone’s name. e.g. "10..9..8..7..6..5..4..3..2..1..Alex, you're it!" If they have not managed to leave the breakout room during the countdown, (s)he will be the next “it”. Demo this in the main session before opening the breakout rooms. 

The Zoom host begins the game by randomly sending everyone into breakout rooms. Everyone will need to know how to access the "breakout room" button at the bottom of their zoom screen and click "join" to join a different room. 

At the end of the game, the Zoom host will close the rooms and everyone will return to the main session. Note that if you have a countdown timer, people will not be able to move between rooms once the host closes the room so set it to something short, like 15 seconds.

If people come back to the main session, the Zoom host will send them back into a random breakout room.

Note: People using a Chromebook, tablet, or phone may not be able to freely move themselves between breakout rooms. They will need to return to the main session to be put in a new room by the host.

Variations

Safe room: Create a “safe” breakout room where you can’t get tagged. 

Freeze Tag: Choose a few people to be it as before. These people will be it for the whole game. Its fun to have these people rename themselves, dress up, add filters, or otherwise visually distinguish themselves as "it". When they catch someone instead of that person becoming it, they freeze (strike a frozen pose, just like people do when they have a bad connection on Zoom).

To unfreeze them, anyone can come back into the room and sing Happy Birthday to them. If the singer gets to the end of the birthday song without being tagged, they are now unfrozen and can continue to play the game. If you enter a breakout room and multiple people are frozen, you have to unfreeze each person one at a time by singing each of them the full birthday song (before an "it" comes back in the room). Its especially important in this version to check the BR room menu to find the rooms of frozen people and help them out!