Are you working from home? Do you find it difficult to keep spirits up during this pandemic-imposed virtual work environment? If so, then keep on reading as we’ve got a few tips that will bring some cheer to you and your colleagues (family and friends too) during these tough times.

The corona virus has forced us all to change our daily routines and stay home as much as possible, if not all the time. It’s easy to get discouraged or frustrated from all the news going around, especially as there is a high level of uncertainty in the days ahead. To battle low spirits among our staff, the Bible Society set up a special morning routine, in addition to our Wednesdays Bible devotions, that has been very successful in brightening everyone’s day from the get-go.

The secret? Virtual games!

We’re going to share with you some of the games that we enjoyed most, in the hopes that you can also enjoy them with your colleagues, family and friends.

Here we go!

Bible related games:

1- EMOJI Guess the Bible place: 
Put together names of places from the Bible using emojis.

Ex: 🏠🥩 = بيت لحم (emojis might not appear properly on pc)

How to play:

• Have the list of emoji names on the screen all together or one by one
• Take count of who has the most correct guesses, that would be your winner 

Free sources:

• You can take this game as is and play it with your group. Click to play and view the full list: emoji places in Arabic
• Here is a similar concept with emoji Bible stories

2- Bible Trivia:
Prepare a list of Bible related questions. You can come up with your own set of questions or search google for some.

How to play:

• Let each two individuals play against each other.
• The person who gives the correct answer first would be the winner qualified to stay in the competition.

Free sources:

We have created two quizzes in both Arabic and English that could be of help to you. You can see the quizzes on our blog: https://biblesociety.org.lb/en/blog

3- Who am I?
Write down a list of Bible characters, then 3 sentences about that character in the first person.

For example:

-          Jonathan:

• I am a friend of a very important political leader
• I am the son of a king
• My father is envious of the friend I just told you about

-          Miriam (Moses’ sister)

• I like to dance to the sound of the drum
• I witnessed the biggest miracle in the old testament
• My brother led God’s people out of Egypt

How to play:

- Let each two play against each other

- Start by saying one sentence. If neither guesses the character, continue with saying the other two hints one by one.

- The person who guesses first, wins.

4-  Guess the Hymn: 
Prepare a list of popular Christian hymns that are familiar to your group.

How to play:

• Let each two people play against each other.
• Play the first 4 seconds of the tune either on an instrument or from YouTube.
• The person who guesses the name of the hymn first would be the winner to stay in the competition.

Random games:

1-      What are you most grateful for during this lockdown? 
It’s true that the cause for this lockdown is a dangerous virus, but the result of us staying home does not have to be as destructive.
We now have more time to spend in Bible reading, more time to spend with our families, and finish tasks that had been left on the shelf for quite some time.

This question encouraged our staff to look at the good things and opened our hearts to express prayers of thanksgiving.

2-      Treasure hunt:

Preparation:

• Write down a list of items that can be found in any household.

How to play:

• Let each two individuals play against each other.
• Say the name of an item
• The person who find it first and shows it to the group on the camera would be the winner.

This was a particularly funny game. Usually for our morning calls we do not have our cameras open, so for this game, we heard fast footsteps and rumbling noises as our colleagues were trying to find the items around the house before they opened their cameras.

3-      Guess the dream job: 
Ask the group to send you privately, ahead of time, what their dream job would be had life and circumstances not gotten in the way. If you are in a work environment, people might be tempted to state that their current job is their dream one (which might be true), but encourage people to think outside the box.

How to play:

• During the call, show on the screen the list of the jobs without their respective names
• Take count to see if people are able to match their colleagues/friends to their correct dream jobs.

This is a fun bonding game. It allows the group to learn more about each other. A follow up question to individuals with the most unexpected dream jobs would be to find out what stopped them from pursuing their dreams.

4-      4 pics one word: 
This was a popular game application a while back. The concept is that there are four images on the screen, all which point to one word.

Example: The answer for the below would be “cold”

Preparation:

• Collect as many image questions from the app or from google.
• You can crop out the letters from the bottom of the images to make it more difficult as we have done above

How to play:

• Share the screen to show each question
• Allow all the group to answer at once
• The person who gets the highest number of correct answers would be the winner

We hope these games can brighten your days as they brightened ours!