PULTEVENT
Year in review party ideas: 8 ways to look back at the year on the big screen
A converted warehouse in Leeds, the Thursday before the office closes for Christmas. Forty people from a small design agency sit at trestle tables with pizza boxes open between them. On the wall, a projector shows four cards: the office move, the new client in Glasgow, the week the server died, the day Hannah brought her puppy in. The job is to put them in the right order. Two tables are already arguing about whether the puppy came before or after the server. It came after. Nobody believes me.
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Every team has a year worth looking back at, and almost every end-of-year meeting wastes it on a slide deck of numbers. A year in review done properly is a party about the people who were there: the wins, the disasters, the in-jokes that only make sense to the forty people in that room. It takes about an hour, and it is the part of December people still mention in March.
I have hosted a lot of these for companies, from ten-person startups to sales floors of three hundred. These days I run them in PULTEVENT. The laptop drives everything from a browser, the projector shows the game, and the team plays from their phones after scanning a QR code. Nothing to install. Phones need internet, so check the venue's Wi-Fi before you promise the boss a live vote.
8 year-in-review rounds, from the photo wall to the closing credits
1 The photo recap on arrival
While people come in, the screen runs a slideshow of the year's photos: the offsite, the Friday lunches, the whiteboard nobody wiped for a month. A caption on top says the team name and the year.
How to run it. Ask everyone to drop their photos in a shared folder two weeks out. Remove anything that would embarrass someone in front of their manager.
People start talking about the year before you have said a word, which makes your first round much easier.
2 The timeline game
Four to six events from your year appear as cards. Each player arranges them in order on their phone, and the screen shows who got closest. Repeat with the next batch.
How to run it. Mix big company events with small team ones. The launch date everyone knows; the day the coffee machine broke is harder.
It is a genuinely difficult game about something everybody lived through, which is the best kind of difficult.
3 The year quiz
Twelve questions, one for each month, written by you. How many pizzas were ordered for the launch night, which city did the sales team visit most, what was the name of the plant in reception.
How to run it. Get two or three questions from each department. Nobody should be able to answer all of them.
Different teams discover what the others did all year, which is more than most internal newsletters achieve.
4 Guess the colleague
A fact about someone's year appears on the screen: learned to surf, ran a marathon, became a grandmother, visited nine countries for work. The room guesses who it is.
How to run it. Collect facts with consent and keep them positive. Include a senior person or two; the room loves guessing the boss.
It puts faces to people who only exist in email for the rest of the year, which matters in bigger companies.
5 Messages from people who could not be there
Short clips from a colleague on parental leave, a founder abroad, a client who has worked with the team all year. They play on the big screen between rounds.
How to run it. Ask for landscape, a quiet room and under a minute. Watch every clip beforehand, because a client message is still a client message.
It widens the room beyond whoever managed to turn up on a Thursday in December.
6 The year's awards
Six to eight categories, voted live from phones: best save of the year, calmest person during the server outage, most creative expense claim. Special awards first, then the podium.
How to run it. Write categories that refer to real moments from the year. Generic awards get polite applause; specific ones get cheers.
Recognition that comes from colleagues lands differently to recognition from management.
7 The manager's five minutes
If someone senior needs to show a few slides, play their PPTX file straight from the console. No switching laptops, no hunting for the adapter.
How to run it. Put this right after the quiz, when the room is warm, and hold the speaker to five minutes in advance.
The numbers get their moment without taking over the party.
8 The closing credits
The last thing on screen is a film-style credit roll with the names of everyone on the team, and anyone who joined or left this year.
How to run it. Put music under it and do not talk over it. Let it run to the end before the bar opens.
It ends the look-back properly and gives the whole team one shared, quiet moment.
Your year, not a generic quiz
Every round is built from what actually happened to this team, so everyone has something to add.
Timeline game on screen
The room puts the year's events in order from their phones, and the reveal settles every argument.
Photos that go past slide one
A running slideshow of the year's pictures behind every break, with a caption of your choice.
Awards the team votes on
Categories you write, voted live from phones, ending with a podium and confetti.
Gathering the material
Most of the work happens two weeks before. Send one short message to the team asking for three things: photos from the year, one fact about their own year they are happy to share, and one moment they think the whole team should remember. Give them a deadline and a shared folder.
Then ask each department head for two quiz questions and the dates of their big moments. From that you have the timeline, the quiz and the guessing round.
Allow a quiet evening to build it all.
A running order that holds attention
Photo recap during arrival and first drinks. The timeline game as the opener, because the arguments warm the room up. Then the quiz, a video message or two, the manager's five minutes, guess the colleague, the awards and the credits. About an hour and ten minutes in total, then music.
Keep the awards near the end. People stay for them, and once the podium is done the room is ready to switch from listening to dancing.
When the year was a hard one
Not every year in review is a victory lap. Layoffs, a failed launch, a colleague who died. Acknowledge it briefly and honestly at the start, then keep the games about the people who got through it together. Leave out quiz questions about the difficult moments; nobody wants to compete over a bad memory.
"Should we mention the restructure?"
"Once, at the start, and then let people enjoy the evening."
Remote and hybrid teams
Half your team might be in another city. Share the stage window in your usual video call, and remote colleagues see exactly what the room sees. They scan the QR code on their own screen and play from their phones, with the same scores on the same board. Put them on a combined team so they are not always last.
For international teams, the host console is in English and each player's phone follows its own language settings, which you can turn off if you want everyone on the same one.
Not just for work
Friend groups, sports clubs, choirs and book clubs have years too. The same formats work at a December house party: a timeline of the group's trips, a quiz about the year's group chat, awards for the best and worst decisions. Swap the manager's slides for a toast.
The practical side
A laptop, a projector or large screen with an HDMI input, and a venue where phones can get online. The ready-made quiz decks inside the program are mostly in Russian for now, but a year in review is built entirely from your own material, so that makes no difference here.
The free demo runs for 3 days and needs no card, enough to build the rounds and run a test with two colleagues. After that it is a one-time licence, no subscription, priced on 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 a year in review event on the big screen
- 1
Two weeks out, collect photos, personal facts and key moments from the team in a shared folder.
- 2
Build the timeline rounds, the year quiz, the guessing round and the award categories.
- 3
Load the photo slideshow, video messages and any slides into the console.
- 4
At the venue, connect the laptop to the projector and test the Wi-Fi from a phone.
- 5
Open with the photo recap and the timeline, then the quiz, messages and guessing round.
- 6
Finish with the voted awards and the closing credits, then hand over to the music.
FAQ
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See also
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