PULTEVENT
Christmas party games: 7 big-screen games for a UK do, office or family
A hotel function room in Swindon, the second Friday of December. Paper crowns from the crackers, a table of accounts people who have already pulled the last cracker twice to get a better joke, and a projector screen on a stand that someone from facilities has been told to guard with his life. The starters have gone. The DJ is not on until half nine. For the next forty minutes, the room is mine, and eighty people have their phones out anyway.
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That gap between dinner and dancing is where a Christmas party is won or lost, and the same is true in a front room on Christmas Eve with three generations on two sofas. People want something to do together that does not need a board, a pen or a rule book read aloud by the one uncle who actually reads rule books.
PULTEVENT is what I built for that gap. The host console runs in a laptop browser, the projector or the telly shows the games through an HDMI lead, and everyone takes part by pointing a phone camera at the code on screen. Nobody downloads anything or makes an account. The one condition: their phones need internet, either the venue Wi-Fi or mobile data, so check the signal in the room before the night.
7 Christmas games that work on a big screen
1 Decorate the Tree
A bare 3D Christmas tree on the screen. Every guest hangs baubles, tinsel and lights on it from their phone, all at once, and the tree fills up in front of the room.
How to run it. Open it straight after the main course, while people are still at their tables. Say nothing more than 'scan the code and hang something'.
Nobody can lose, so even the ones who swore they would not join in end up hanging a bauble. It warms the room up for everything after.
2 The festive quiz
Questions on the screen, four answers on each phone, a countdown, and the scores update after every question. Mix proper Christmas trivia with questions only your lot could answer.
How to run it. Build it in the quiz builder. The ready-made quiz decks are mostly in Russian at the moment, so for a UK do your questions are your own, which is how it should be.
A question about the office kettle or Grandad's famous sprouts gets a louder reaction than any fact about reindeer.
3 Horse Race
Horses on the screen, each guest backing one from their phone and tapping to push it along. Tables or families cheer their horse home.
How to run it. Run it in two or three heats and a final. Name the horses after departments or branches of the family.
Short, noisy and simple enough for someone three glasses of mulled wine in.
4 Fake karaoke
A volunteer sings along to a backing track. Unknown to them, the program records their voice, and at the end you play it back with the music taken away.
How to run it. Choose someone with thick skin and a good sense of humour. The MD who likes being liked is usually perfect.
It is the story people tell on the way to the taxi rank.
5 Christmas charades
The screen gives one person a film, a song or a Christmas object to act out, their team guesses against the clock. The word stays hidden from everyone but the actor.
How to run it. Bring the actor up to the front so the whole room sees the performance, not just the team.
It gets grandparents and teenagers laughing at the same thing, which is rarer than it sounds.
6 The QR raffle
Guests register by scanning a QR code, then the draw spins names on the big screen and lands on a winner. No tickets, no bucket, no half-torn stubs.
How to run it. Keep the big prize for last and draw the small ones between the other games.
The room goes quiet for every spin. You can run a whole night off that silence.
7 Dance battle
Two teams, a track each, the room votes from their phones for who owned the floor. The result shows up as bars on the screen.
How to run it. Put it last, just before the DJ takes over, and hand the floor straight to the music.
Everyone is already standing up when the dancing proper starts.
One laptop, one screen
Projector in a function room or the living-room telly. An HDMI cable does the rest.
Phones become controllers
Guests scan the QR code and play in the browser. Nothing to install.
Works for eight or eighty
The same games scale from a family Christmas Eve to a full office do.
Your own questions
Write the Christmas quiz yourself, in-jokes included, in the quiz builder.
The office do and the family Christmas are different rooms
At work, you are dealing with eighty people who know each other in one direction only. Sales know sales. The warehouse knows the warehouse. Games that mix tables, like a quiz played by table or a horse race where each table backs a horse, give them a reason to talk across the room.
At home it is the opposite. Everybody knows everybody far too well, and the challenge is getting Nan, a nine-year-old and a brother-in-law who only watches the football to play the same thing. Here the 3D games and charades do more than the quiz, because nobody needs to know anything to take part.
A running order for a works Christmas party
Arrival and drinks with a splash screen on the projector: the company name, the date, maybe a slideshow of photos from the year. Dinner. Then a forty-minute block of games before the DJ: Decorate the Tree to wake everyone up, the quiz in the middle, the raffle draw spread across it, and a dance battle to finish.
Keep speeches before the games, not after. Once people have been laughing for half an hour, nobody wants to sit through the quarterly numbers again.
Christmas Eve or Boxing Day in the front room
Plug the laptop into the telly, put the QR code up and let people join from the sofa. Twenty minutes is enough: the tree, a short quiz about the family, one round of charades. Then give the telly back.
"Do I need to download anything?"
"No, Mum. Just point the camera at the screen."
What the venue needs to give you
An HDMI input on the projector or screen, a table near a socket for the laptop, and a Wi-Fi password that actually works for eighty phones at once. Ask for it in writing. Many hotels have a guest network that struggles when a whole party logs on, so tell guests they can use mobile data too. Without any connection, the phone games do not run. The splash screens and videos do, from the laptop.
If your venue has a house sound system, ask for a jack or a Bluetooth input so the fake karaoke playback comes through the speakers rather than the laptop.
When half the team is working from home
Some companies now run a small party in the office and let the rest dial in. Share the stage window in your video call and remote colleagues see the same screen as the room. They scan the QR code off their monitor and play from their phones, same as everyone else.
Trying it before the big night
The free 3-day demo does not ask for a card. That is time enough to write the quiz, load photos of the year onto the splash screen and run a test game with the family on a Sunday. If it suits you, you pay once for the licence and that is the end of it, no monthly charges. Current pricing: pultevent.ru/en.
About the author
PULTEVENT was built by Ruslan Barashkin, who has hosted weddings, birthdays and office parties since 2014: over 500 events, best host of Moscow 2024 and of Saint Petersburg 2023 at the TOP 100 Awards. He made it for his own nights first. The rest is at pultevent.ru/en.
How to run Christmas party games on a big screen
- 1
A week before, write your quiz and pick three or four other games.
- 2
Load a splash screen with the company name or family photos and the date.
- 3
At the venue, connect the laptop to the projector or telly and test the Wi-Fi on your phone.
- 4
Put the QR code on screen as people sit down after dinner.
- 5
Run the games in order, with the raffle draws dropped in between.
- 6
Close on the dance battle and hand the room to the music.
FAQ
How many people can play at once?
Can older relatives join in without a smartphone?
Is the host console in English?
Do guests need Wi-Fi?
Can I play the MD's slides from the same laptop?
What does it cost?
See also
Run brighter events — with PULTEVENT
All audience interactions, a second screen and timing in one app. Guests join by QR — internet is needed for you and for them.
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