Virtual games are a fun way to make Zoom meetings a little less dreadful. By adding in a little competition and camaraderie, you can give participants that boost of energy they might need. 

Here at twine, we have weekly Zoom meetings where one team member is responsible for curating a 30-minute experience to build camaraderie within our distributed team.

Last week, our co-founder Taylor got extra creative: he figured out how to play musical chairs on Zoom.

How’d he do it? 

Taylor used the free version of our Zoom App - twine for Zoom - and Zoom’s computer audio sharing feature to create a hilarious musical game.  

Read on for a step-by-step process on how you can turn your next Zoom team hangout into an experience that people will be talking about for the rest of the week!

How to Play Musical Chairs on Zoom

Before setting up the game, you’ll need to have twine for Zoom downloaded to your Zoom account. twine is an extension that makes it easy for Zoom hosts to enable advanced breakout rooms and speed networking. It’s free for up to 5 people.

Download twine for Zoom

Once you have the app downloaded and have invited your Zoom meeting participants into the app, you can get started.

Step 1: Create the breakout room(s) using twine for Zoom

Using Map Mode, set up the number of rooms and available seats for team members to join. You can do multiple tables or just one; the only thing you have to make sure of is that the number of seats available should be one less than the number of people playing.

So if you have six people playing, create a table of five. 

Need help setting up Map Mode? Read this.

Step 2: Choose a fun song to share!

💃 Open a music player like Spotify or Apple music in a separate window. For our game of musical chairs, Taylor started by playing Oye Cómo Va by Tito Puente on his computer using Spotify. 

Need some song inspiration? Taylor created a whole playlist of fun musical chairs-esque songs to use:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0UFnEvIrJZPjucjlNgyWa7?si=bce5a76bc15e45e8

Step 3: Share Computer Audio using Zoom’s share feature

Zoom has a great feature where hosts can share their computer’s audio to the main room.

Simply click Screen Share → Advanced → Computer Audio → Share

Once you share your audio, everyone in the meeting will hear your music. You can adjust the music volume from the music player.

Step 4: Play the music and press pause whenever

Play your music for however long you like, watch as your participants wait in suspense, and pause it without warning. 

Step 5: Participants click “join” on one of the tables. 

Once you hit pause, participants must quickly click “join” on one of the tables. As they join, their profile icons and names will populate in the table seats. 

You can tell who was the last to join by seeing whose profile picture/name didn’t appear in table, or by watching who is last to leave the main room. 

The last person to move is OUT!

Step 5: Click “End breakout” to bring everyone back to the main room

After each round is done you can call out who the last person was to move to the table. That person will sit out subsequent rounds.

Step 6: Repeat steps 1-5 with one less table seat.

Keep cycling through rounds until there’s one person left. The last round is always fun to watch who can grab the single remaining seat in the breakout room.

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Twine for Zoom is great for more than just playing virtual musical chairs. Hosts can run speed-networking experiences, divide participants into breakout rooms based on custom rules, and experiment with tons of virtual game ideas. 

Download the app here to try it out.

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