Have you ever been in a GIF battle? We have and we lived to tell the tale. 😁 After Astea’s first online team building, we were eager to plan our next online team activity. We stumbled upon the following Trello board and we were on board with the idea. Here’s what we learned from the epic GIF Wars: Astea Edition.

Contents

1. What went well?

2. What could have been done differently?

3. On the path to GIF mastery

What went well?

Unsurprisingly, we used Trello for our own GIF contest. Trello automatically displays the attached GIFs on the cards’ covers. This made scrolling through the entries easy and mesmerizing.

Moreover, the Voting Power-Up allows you to sort the cards by vote in two clicks. This was especially useful to the referees who were busy keeping track of the timing and the rules during the heated battle.

Lastly, in order to make the game even more challenging, we decided to spice up the boards by adding topics. We had 2 qualification boards: one dedicated to movie GIFs and one dedicated to animal GIFs. Every board consisted of 6 unique prompts and the contestants had to find the best GIF for each prompt in accordance to the topic. The winners from the two boards faced each other in a final freestyle round with 3 prompts.

What could have been done differently?

We wanted to make the game as challenging as possible, so we gradually reduced the time to post a GIF for each board from 2 minutes for the first 2 prompts to 1 minute for the last prompt. After that, the participants had 30 seconds to vote for the best entry. Unfortunately, this wasn’t optimal for people with slow internet connections who needed more time for uploading, loading and voting.

Also, while the topics were a nice touch, we opted for a difficult topic – movies vs an easy topic – animals. As a result, some of the contestants from the first board were disqualified as they couldn’t find suitable GIFs from movies. This wasn’t a problem for the animal GIFs.

Finally, we could have prepared some music as advised in the Trello template. We thought that we could simply talk while searching for GIFs but as the game unfolded there were some bits of awkward and intense silence. 😄

On the path to GIF mastery

It might take one or two rounds to get accustomed to the mechanics, but it’s a fun and light activity suitable for remote teams. Some colleagues participated only as spectators but they were actively voting and chatting. According to the referees, the audience’s involvement really contributed to the atmosphere making the game something more than just a contest.

If you are into GIFs you will love this game. You never know if you are a true GIF warrior until the votes are cast. We rewarded our winner, the Astea GIF Master, with a custom GIF and Slack emoji. 🎉

Check out how we took our GIF battles to the next level

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