Charades Relay
Charades Relay is an applied improv exercise for psychological safety: it helps participants build trust while keeping the stakes low.
How to run it
- Teams compete against each other trying to be the first to guess all of the items on the list.
- To start ask one member from each team to come to you. Whisper the first word into their ear and return them to their group to be acted out.
- Once a member of the group guesses the word correctly, someone new runs to the instructor for the next word. No one can come up twice until everyone has acted out an item from the list.
- The new member must tell the instructor the word they just guessed to receive the next word from the list.
- The game is over once a team completes the entire list.
Run this exercise live
The facilitator console stays in this browser. Its QR handoff is a short-lived participant snapshot containing only public exercise instructions, phase, prompt, and timer state.
What participants need now
Materials:
This is a participant-safe snapshot, not a response form. It sends nothing back to the facilitator.
Prompts to use +
Teams compete against each other trying to be the first to guess all of the items on the list.
To start ask one member from each team to come to you. Whisper the first word into their ear and return them to their group to be acted out.
Once a member of the group guesses the word correctly, someone new runs to the instructor for the next word. No one can come up twice until everyone has acted out an item from the list.
The new member must tell the instructor the word they just guessed to receive the next word from the list.
The game is over once a team completes the entire list.
Run this with your AI assistant +
Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or your own local model: paste this prompt and your AI will co-facilitate this exercise with you.
Adapt this exercise for my exact room. Exercise: Charades Relay. Readiness: Publishable Draft. Core moves: Teams compete against each other trying to be the first to guess all of the items on the list.; To start ask one member from each team to come to you. Whisper the first word into their ear and return them to their group to be acted out.; Once a member of the group guesses the word correctly, someone new runs to the instructor for the next word. No one can come up twice until everyone has acted out an item from the list.; The new member must tell the instructor the word they just guessed to receive the next word from the list.. Return a concise facilitator script with timing, wording, safety notes, and remote/in-person adjustments.
Origin unverified
- Where we observed it: The strongest current observations come from Playworks; aggregators are listed as additional observations, not origin proof. (1 source observed, including Playworks.)
- What that means: we track where an exercise has been observed in public sources. We do not claim to know who created it, or how popular it is.
- No efficacy claims: appearing in this library is not a claim that the exercise is proven effective. Facilitator judgment and context decide whether it works for a given room.
- Corrections: if you have evidence of an earlier or more accurate source, read our methodology and trust boundary and tell us.