Three real life team building scenarios I lived through as an employee:

A. I was put in charge of captaining a sailboat with zero knowledge or experience for a team building event. I spent the next three hours in way over my head, in total panic 🛟

B. We went out for drinks "on the company" for team building, but one of my colleagues didn't drink for religious reasons. He was gracious enough to join us, but I could tell he felt out of place.

C. We did a scavenger hunt, and one of our colleagues who was recovering from a hip replacement was several hundred feet behind, unable to run from point A to point B. I stayed back to walk with her while she held back tears.

If the team building was in the room in any of these events, I never found it.

Companies spend billions of dollars each year on retreats, escape rooms, ropes courses, happy hours, and countless other team-building experiences. The intention is almost always the same: build trust, improve communication, and help colleagues connect outside of their daily responsibilities.

Yet many of these events quietly fail before they even begin, because they're unintentionally designed for only part of the team.

The goal is creating a level playing field where everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute. A level playing field doesn't erase differences. It removes unnecessary barriers.

1. Does participation depend on physical ability?

If your activity requires running, climbing, balancing, or athleticism, some members of your team have already been excluded.

Great team-building activities allow people to contribute regardless of physical ability.

2. Is the environment accessible?

Loud venues, flashing lights, and constant background noise may feel energetic, but they can become barriers for employees with hearing differences, sensory sensitivities, or neurodivergent needs.

Real connection happens when everyone can comfortably hear, think, and engage.

3. Does it only reward extroverts?

Some activities naturally favor the loudest voice in the room, but workplaces aren't built by just the loudest people. They're built by thoughtful problem-solvers, careful listeners, creative thinkers, and collaborative teammates.

Great experiences create multiple ways for people to contribute.

4. Does competition overshadow collaboration?

When the objective becomes beating coworkers, people protect themselves instead of trusting one another.

The best team-building experiences create shared wins rather than individual victories.

5. Does the event revolve around alcohol?

Happy hours are convenient and easy to organize, but they're also one of the least inclusive forms of team building. Employees may avoid alcohol for health, religious, personal, recovery, or family reasons.

When drinking becomes the centerpiece of social interaction, some teammates are automatically pushed to the sidelines.

6. Can everyone get the gist?

Are you signed up for an escape room because Joe in Sales loves them, but everyone else struggles with puzzles?

The best activities have a low barrier to entry that gets people involved in the first few minutes.

At Once Upon a Roll, we don't believe tabletop games magically build better teams.

What we do exceptionally well is remove the barriers before anyone walks in the room.

Nobody has to run. Nobody has to drink. Nobody has to be the loudest person at the table to matter, because in a good story the quiet character who notices the detail everyone else missed is usually the one who saves the party.

The games we run are collaborative rather than competitive, so the win belongs to everyone or nobody, and they're simple enough that people are playing within the first five minutes instead of reading a rulebook.

We run them in rooms where you can actually hear each other, and we bring braille dice for players who need them.

Turn taking is built into the structure, which means participation isn't something a facilitator has to coax out of people. It's just how the game works.

And around the game table, the CEO doesn't automatically have the answers and the newest employee isn't expected to stay quiet. For a few hours, people stop interacting through job titles and start interacting as teammates.

I still think about that sailboat, and the colleague nursing a club soda, and my friend walking a scavenger hunt several hundred feet behind everyone else. In every one of those rooms, somebody had a good intention but nobody asked the obvious question first.

The best teams aren't built by putting everyone through the same experience. They're built by designing experiences where everyone belongs.

Laura

P.S. If you're trying to figure out how to make the case for Once Upon a Roll at your company, grab our Make the Case Kit. It gives you everything you need to bring to your leadership: what purposeful play actually does for a team, what a session looks like from start to finish, and how it stacks up against the team building you've already tried.

P.P.S. This is a really big week for me — I’m both speaking at GenCon on how I use TRPGs in Companies and running a game! Follow along on LinkedIn and Instagram.

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