Trust fall game: catch your team, not your manager

Catch the team

Your coworkers walk out of a door onto the mezzanine, cross their arms, shut their eyes and fall. Run along the carpet and be under each one when they reach arm height. A shadow on the carpet marks the spot where they’ll reach your arms, and it darkens as they come down.

Interns are light and bounce off your arms once, so you catch them twice. Some coworkers flail on the way down and drift sideways. Tap or drag on the room to run to a spot, or hold the arrow keys.

Step away from management

Managers wear a navy suit and a red tie, and they fall smiling with their eyes shut, sure somebody will catch them. Their shadow on the carpet gets a dashed ring in red pen. Don’t stand in it.

Once a session the CEO jumps too, in a gold tie. He floats down on a golden parachute, swaying from side to side, while the rest of the team keeps falling around him.

A boss who lands on the carpet gets up fine, every time. The hard part is the coworker who falls a third of a second after them.

How Trust Fall scores

A coworker caught is 10 points. Five catches in a row double every catch and ten triple it. A dropped coworker scores nothing and takes the streak down one step.

A manager who lands in your arms costs 50 points and the CEO costs 100, and either one takes the streak down a step as well. Stand under a boss while they wobble or fall, then step out before they reach your arms. That near miss pays 10 points, or 30 for the CEO, at the streak’s multiplier. The score never drops below zero, and the most a session can score is 1,130.

The grade is the share of coworkers you caught, less a tenth for each manager in your arms and a quarter for the CEO. Catch all 30 and one manager and you still exceed expectations. Catch the CEO and you don’t.

The session

A session runs 60 seconds with 30 coworkers, five managers and the CEO, and it speeds up as it goes. From halfway, some people fall in pairs, a third of a second apart. Today’s session drops the same people from the same spots for everyone, at the venue the result names.

Some days the whole C-suite comes, ten managers and the CEO among the 36 who fall. Some days facilities has polished the floor, so you speed up and stop a lot slower.

Every session is checked as it’s drawn, so a perfect one, every coworker caught and no boss, is always possible. Take your time slows every fall to half speed while you keep your full speed. Pause, or P, holds everyone still in mid-air.

What a trust fall is

In a trust fall you fold your arms, fall, and trust the group to catch you. One version has a circle of people passing someone gently around. The other starts from somewhere high, a stage or a stool, and that’s the one that ends in injuries, head injuries included, when the catchers miss.

Why offices stopped doing them

Trust falls went out of fashion from around the mid-2010s, mostly over liability. The upside was always thin. Whatever trust the session builds shows little sign of lasting into the working week.

Team-building in general has a fan problem. In a 2025 poll of British employees, 31% picked it as one of their least favourite work social activities, more than any other answer. 19% said they don’t like any social activity with colleagues, which is at least consistent.

Getting out of it

The session gets sold as “we’re a family”, and families also catch each other on Saturdays. To miss the offsite whole, pick one of the excuses to get out of work. Lunch afterwards is a pizza party with twelve slices for eleven people.