Virtual Thanksgiving Team Building: Games, Ideas and a Scavenger Hunt

Thanksgiving is the one date in the corporate year that already means something to people, which makes it the easiest to mark and the easiest to get wrong. A distributed team cannot share a table, and the usual substitute — a call where everyone takes a turn saying what they are grateful for — asks a lot of people and gives them nothing to do with their hands.

The alternative is to give the hour a task. Below: a scavenger hunt built for a video call, eight games with a ready-made trivia round, twenty icebreaker questions, and — if you would rather somebody else ran the hour — the Thanksgiving workshops Rockoly runs, with a chef and the ingredients delivered.

When to hold it

US Thanksgiving 2026 is Thursday 26 November, and the team event should not be that week. Monday to Wednesday of Thanksgiving week are thin, with people traveling or already off, so the realistic window is the two weeks before: 9 to 20 November. Anything that ships needs about three weeks, so book by the end of October.

Not everyone on a remote team celebrates it. Canadian colleagues had theirs on the second Monday of October, and teammates outside North America may not mark it at all. Call the event a harvest or end-of-year gathering if the team is international, keep the games about food and the year rather than family holiday memories, and nobody is left explaining why they have no Thanksgiving story.

A virtual Thanksgiving scavenger hunt

10 to 15 minutes · up to about 30 on one call, more in breakout rooms · no preparation · free

The version that works on a video call: the host names an item, and the first person back on camera holding it scores a point. It needs no printing and no hiding, it gets people moving, and it works as well at 9 a.m. as at the end of a Friday. Fifteen prompts, all things most people have within reach:

1. something orange
2. a spice from the cupboard — any spice
3. something that smells like fall
4. a leaf, real or not
5. the oldest cookbook or recipe card in the house
6. something with a turkey on it — or draw one in thirty seconds
7. a mug you would bring to a family dinner
8. the dish you would bring to a potluck, or the pan you would carry it in
9. a board game or a deck of cards
10. a candle
11. a napkin, placemat or anything else that sets a table
12. something that reminds you of home
13. a photo of a meal you cooked this year
14. a pie dish, baking tin or rolling pin
15. the ugliest piece of fall decor within reach

Score the last one by vote rather than speed. For more rounds, our 40 scavenger hunt clues work on a call too.

8 virtual Thanksgiving games for work

Each one runs on any video platform with nothing more than a shared screen and the chat.

1. Thanksgiving trivia

15 minutes · any size, in teams of four to six · the questions below

Ten questions, with the answers underneath. Read them twice, give each team thirty seconds, and mark at the end.

1. Which president proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving in 1863?
2. Which writer and magazine editor campaigned for decades for a national Thanksgiving, earning the nickname “Mother of Thanksgiving”?
3. In 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving a week earlier to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. What did critics call it?
4. In what year did Congress fix Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November?
5. In what year did Macy’s hold its first parade in New York?
6. Which Native American people shared the 1621 harvest celebration at Plymouth?
7. How many days did that 1621 celebration last?
8. Which president held the first official turkey pardon, in 1989?
9. On which day does Canada celebrate Thanksgiving?
10. Closest number wins: roughly how many Wampanoag men does the colonist Edward Winslow’s account say came to the 1621 feast?

Answers: 1. Abraham Lincoln. 2. Sarah Josepha Hale. 3. “Franksgiving”. 4. 1941. 5. 1924. 6. The Wampanoag, led by Massasoit. 7. Three days. 8. George H. W. Bush. 9. The second Monday of October. 10. About ninety.

For more rounds on other subjects, our 100 trivia questions for corporate events come with answers.

2. The hand turkey contest

10 minutes · any size · paper and pens

Everyone traces their hand on a sheet of paper and turns it into a turkey, the way every American child has, in four minutes flat. Hold them up to the camera and vote in three categories: most realistic, most artistic, and most likely to have been drawn during a meeting. It is silly, which is exactly why it works at the start of a call.

3. Thanksgiving Pictionary

15 to 20 minutes · 6 to 24 people in two teams · a list of prompts

Use the whiteboard built into Zoom or Teams and send each prompt to the drawer in a private message. Prompts that are harder than they sound: carving the turkey, the kids’ table, a parade balloon, a traffic jam on the way to Grandma’s, a food coma, a pie that went wrong, the wishbone, leftovers in the fridge, the last seat at the table, falling asleep in front of the football.

4. Two truths and a tradition

15 to 20 minutes · 6 to 30 people · three statements each, prepared in advance

Each person shares three things about how they spend the holiday season — whichever holiday that is — two of them true and one invented. The team guesses the fake. It works for teammates who do not celebrate Thanksgiving at all, which is the point of phrasing it that way.

5. The side dish bracket

10 minutes · any size · a poll tool

Eight side dishes, drawn up as a knockout bracket: stuffing against mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes against green bean casserole, and so on to a final. Run each match as a ten-second poll. Nothing on a Thanksgiving call generates more heat for less at stake, and the final is usually a genuine surprise.

6. Guess whose table

15 minutes · 5 to 30 people · photos collected a few days ahead

Ask everyone to send a photo of one dish their family always makes — for any holiday — and a line about it. Show them one at a time and have the team guess whose it is before the owner tells the story. Collect the photos privately, and make it clear that sending one is optional.

7. Thanksgiving movie charades

15 minutes · 6 to 20 people in two teams · a list of titles

Charades on camera, with films set around the holiday: Planes, Trains and Automobiles, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, Home for the Holidays, Free Birds and Miracle on 34th Street, which opens at the Thanksgiving parade. Mix in parades, football and pie if you run out.

8. Would you rather: Thanksgiving edition

5 to 10 minutes · any size · the list below

Quick-fire, one answer each, in the chat or on camera. Would you rather: host the dinner or wash the dishes? Only eat stuffing or only eat pie? Sit at the kids’ table forever or carve the turkey every year? Watch the parade or the football? Travel on the Wednesday or the Sunday?

20 Thanksgiving icebreaker questions

Keep them to five minutes at the top of a call — a warm-up, not a meeting. Pick three or four:

1. What is the one dish that has to be on the table, or it does not count?
2. Stuffing or mashed potatoes, and why is everyone else wrong?
3. What does your family make that nobody else seems to?
4. What is the best leftover combination you have ever invented?
5. Pumpkin, apple or pecan — or are you only here for the whipped cream?
6. Are you the cook, the helper, the dishwasher or the guest?
7. What is your go-to dish for a potluck?
8. Football, the parade, a walk or a nap?
9. What is the best meal you ate this year?
10. What is a small thing that went right for you this year?
11. What did you learn this year that you did not expect to?
12. What is a tradition you started yourself?
13. What holiday tradition from somewhere else would you adopt?
14. If this team had a signature dish, what would it be?
15. Kids’ table or adults’ table — which was more fun?
16. What is the most chaotic holiday meal you have been to?
17. If you could invite anyone to a holiday meal, who would it be?
18. What is one skill you want to learn before next year?
19. What are you looking forward to before the end of the year?
20. Which colleague would you want in the kitchen with you?

For more, our 60 icebreaker questions are sorted by group size and by how well the team already knows each other.

The Thanksgiving cooking workshops

If the hour should be one shared thing rather than a string of games, this is the part Rockoly runs. A chef teaches live on Zoom while a host runs the room, and every ingredient arrives at each person’s door beforehand — so everybody is cooking the same dish at the same time, rather than watching one person cook.

The Thanksgiving menu has eight workshops, and every one can be made vegetarian, vegan or gluten-free when you ask in advance:

• Butternut Bisque — the soup course, roasted squash with cream and maple croutons. 60 minutes.
• Turkey Roulade — turkey breast rolled around a herb stuffing, with mashed potatoes and gravy. The one that reads as Thanksgiving on screen, and the longest, at 90 minutes.
• Turkey Meatballs — in a sweet and savory cranberry sauce, over mashed potatoes. 60 minutes.
• Cran Chicken with Stuffing — chicken braised in cranberry sauce, over homemade sourdough stuffing. 60 minutes.
• Candied Sweet Potato Bites — topped with whipped goat cheese and toasted pecans, and the most-reviewed of the eight. 60 minutes.
• Roasted Cran Goat Cheese — goat cheese roasted with cranberries, almonds and honey, with crostini. 60 minutes.
• Cream Cheese Pumpkin Bars — the dessert people photograph. 60 minutes.
• Pumpkin Pie Bites — mini pumpkin pies with homemade whipped cream. 60 minutes.

Our Thanksgiving menu, dish by dish says what makes each one work and which suits which team.

How the price works. Each workshop has its own per-person rate on the Thanksgiving workshops page, and every rate steps down twice as the group grows, above 30 people and again above 50, with a flat rate for a group under five. The rate covers the chef, the host, a dedicated event planner, every ingredient, US shipping and gratuities. The page carries the current figures rather than this post, because they change and a post does not.

The host also runs a trivia round and a mini scavenger hunt between courses at no extra charge — both are built into every Rockoly event.

Book it around the shipping, not the chef

The constraint on a virtual Thanksgiving is not whether a chef is free. It is whether the kit reaches every address before the day, and that gets harder in November than at any other point in the year, because every carrier in the country is under the same pressure.

So collect addresses early. Headcount, addresses and dietary requests are due 14 days before the event; the kits then ship and arrive one to three days ahead, insured, so a box that is lost, delayed or damaged is replaced. International delivery is available at additional cost — flag those addresses when you book, because they are due sooner.

Free ideas worth doing yourself

Not everything needs a vendor, and a good Thanksgiving hour often mixes one booked thing with two free ones.

Write the thank-yous down. Ask people to name one specific thing a colleague did this year — not “great teamwork”, an actual incident. Specificity is what makes it land, and it is the whole reason the generic version falls flat. It costs nothing, it is the closest thing to the holiday’s actual subject, and it belongs with any other employee appreciation you do.

Give the hour to something else entirely. A team that volunteers together — remotely or locally, on company time rather than a Saturday — gets more out of it than most structured activities deliver, and the company time is the part that signals it is meant.

Run a lunch and learn with a real subject. Native American history is the obvious one for the date and is usually handled badly. Done properly, with a prepared speaker rather than a slide someone made that morning, it is better than another game. If nobody can prepare it properly, do something else instead.

Where this fits in the wider holiday run

Thanksgiving is the front end of a season that runs to January, and the same team usually books twice. The holiday specials page carries the December lineup, so if you are choosing a Thanksgiving date it is worth looking at both at once — the second booking is easier to get a good slot for when it is made in October rather than after the first one lands.

For teams that would rather drink than cook, a virtual happy hour or a wine tasting fills the same hour. For something with a puzzle in it, the happy hour murder mystery is the game Rockoly runs.

Keep reading

• Thanksgiving Activities for Teams: The Cooking Menu, Dish by Dish
• Thanksgiving Leftovers: 30 Ideas Sorted by What You Have
• 25 Virtual Holiday Party Ideas for Work Teams
• Christmas Events for Remote Teams