Games are About Connection
I’ve always had a thing for games - and not just the typical ones everyone knows. Growing up, our kitchen table was covered in the kind of board games most people had never heard of. Fireball Island, Dark Tower, and the slightly chaotic stuff my older brother would bring home.
In high school and university, I shifted into video games (and, like most of my friends at the time, spent more money than I should have on Magic: The Gathering). Games were still about connection, though, and some of my best memories are just sitting shoulder to shoulder with friends, passing around controllers, and trash talking when I’d win a Tekken match with the unlikely “Zoo Crew” of Kuma the dancing bear and Roger the boxing kangaroo.
When we moved to Singapore after our daughter was born, I stepped away from video games, partly to keep the house quiet and partly as a conscious choice to reduce screen time. Around that time, my brother sent me a board game for my birthday - a zombie game, no less - and just like that, I was hooked again.
Joining Google Singapore brought another kind of shift. Back when there were only 400 of us in a smaller office, you’d see people all the time, bump into each other on the staircase, and grab lunch without even planning it. But when we moved to a much bigger office, I noticed those casual, spontaneous connections disappearing, so I started something: the Google Board Game Café.
It was a simple way for people to sit down, play something fun, and just connect. There was no big agenda, no performance pressure. For me, board games have never been about competition. My favorites are cooperative games where everyone’s working toward a common goal. You learn a lot about people when you see how they handle setbacks, when they celebrate wins together, and when they collaborate under pressure. Sound familiar? That’s the exact kind of dynamic we see in our escape room training and team development training workshops today.
That’s why I believe games, especially well-designed, purposeful ones, can be powerful tools for building trust in teams. Some of the best relationships I built at Google started over a game board. And many of those connections followed me home, literally. I regularly host game nights at my place, and those bonds became friendships that lasted well beyond the office.
To me, leadership training is about connection, and sometimes, the simplest way to build it is by sitting down, playing a game, and learning how to work together. Whether it’s a casual board game, an immersive escape room Singapore challenge, or a structured leadership escape room training program, the goal is the same: creating meaningful moments of collaboration, trust, and growth.
