Some office games for when the boss is out

A lot of people are going to be out the rest of the week, but some of us are stuck punching the clock and making sure that the cogs of progress keep turning. That's okay. You may not be out playing in the sun, but there are ways to have some fun.

Office games are simply ways to keep yourself amused at work (without the Internet). They are often derivations of regular pastimes. Each workplace has their own versions. They can be very elaborate or very simple. Some are very solitary, in others you have everyone on up to the manager playing. Some places you have to keep it very secret, others have leagues with t-shirts. If you work in a technical field they are nearly traditional, and as the movement towards more enlightened HR policies is rippling out through other industries, so are they.

I'm not talking about office pranks here. Your level of creativity in expressing your feelings about the guys who got to take the whole rest of the week off and you didn't is entirely your call. I'd recommend a thorough reading of your employee manual before drywalling over their office door. I'm just saying. Besides, you have to paint the whole wall to make it match and that's a pain. Individually shrink-wrapping everything in their office is more fun anyways.

If you're bringing this concept into your workplace, start small and build it slowly. Ease them into it. That way management gets used to it and doesn't freak out. If you've ever boiled a lobster you've got the general idea. Once they trust that the job is still going to get done and that you're not damaging anything they might even join in.

These games come in several categories to fit your office environment and the type of players. So think about your players and the amount of mayhem you want to create and see if you can find one below that might fit.

Tame:
These are pretty easy to fit into just about any corporate environment. Probably won't get you fired if you don't get too stupid about it.

Hallway Golf
This is a combination of miniature golf and scavenger hunt/orienteering. Sort of a gateway drug; most managers understand the lure of the fairway and will look somewhat kindly on you finding some way to make do when you're stuck in the office.

Rules: Someone prepares a "course" mapped out through the building and you have to follow it; lowest number of strokes wins. Highest number usually has to give some sort of forfeit like pay for the pizza or keep the blow-up Godzilla in their office for the day.
Materials: 9 or 18 drink cups from the cafeteria, postal tape to secure them to surfaces, golf putters (or pointers from the conference room with room signs taped to the ends), golf-sized Wiffle balls, wads of office paper wrapped with rubber bands, or if you're feeling brave or playing outside try real golf balls
Time: It all really depends on how many holes you want to put out, and just how many of them involve light fixtures, triple-cushion shots down the stairwell, or roof access.
Variants: You can play a genteel version where the various holes are just inside the building, or you can go extreme with it and include all the local landscape; that fountain out front makes a great water hazard if you put a hole in the mouth of that fishy-thingy in the middle.
Stock Nerf
This is a geek/college standard and it translates well into the office. Driving that annoying PM back into his office in a hail of rubber darts is a great team-building exercise. Really.

Rules: All participating units must be stock as taken out of the box. Some places require it to be as purely stock and as regulated as NASCAR. Others allow custom ammo but limited it to what you can make out of the contents of the supply closet and the cafeteria condiments bins. No paper clips and NO PEPPER!
Materials: Nerf weapons, various office supplies repurposed as targets or other props
Time: Any time, any place. Except a status meeting. Don't recommend it for those. I used to have a dev lead who used a Nerf as a pointer in meetings, but we weren't encouraged to bring our own.
Variants: Tactics and challenges are as individual as the terrain of your office. Look at your favorite FPS or paintball gametypes for ideas. Capture the Flag, Territories, target challenges and random Slayer-type snipefests are traditional. Do not recommend Plasma Punchout.
Frisky:
Sometimes you end up with a group for whom time wasting has reached the status of art. Especially back in the bowels of the IT department where management fears to tread.

Cube Battleship
The classic board game, played out on a bigger scale.

Rules: The two players put their coffee cups in a square on a desk blotter with a letter/numbered grid marked out on it. Then you take turns aiming and firing over the wall at the unseen target with whatever you want to mockup as a weapon. The target reports the coordinates of the square the missile actually landed in if it missed or you get that outraged, "You sank my battleship!" for a perfect splashdown.
Materials: cubicle walls or other barriers, desk pads (use the ones with calendars printed on them and write the coordinates in the corners of the dates), rubber bands, paper clips or wadded up sticky notes and the guys in the next cube's fresh cup of coffee.
Time: This one is great for anytime a boss isn't actually staring at you, because it's played sitting at your desk. And it's not time-dependent, so a quick round while waiting for the printer is an easy possibility.
Variants: Extra points if you want to get a hold of different desktop containers to use for other ships which require multiple hits. I have a long, skinny pencil tray that makes an excellent aircraft carrier. Once you get proficient at this, playing with people in farther cubicles adds another level of challenge. Just be polite and call in your strikes via the intercom or IM rather than shouting down the aisle. If you're an architect, systems analyst, or artist with lots of work-related important papers around that don't take splashes well, it's recommended you play with an empty cup.