Peptide research is slow, careful work, and most of our days are spent on synthesis checks, HPLC traces, and reading methods sections that never quite match what we see at the bench. Last spring our group started looking for a low-effort way to close out the week together, and we landed on a multiplayer party game app that everyone could run from their own phone. It has become one of the more useful habits we have picked up, and this post explains what we play, why it works for a mixed team, and what we would tell another lab considering the same thing.
What we were actually looking for
Our group is small. We have two postdocs, a graduate student who joined mid-year, a lab technician, and a principal investigator who is good at many things but not at trivia. Anything we chose had to meet a few basic conditions:
- It needed to work on both iOS and Android, because our devices are split almost evenly.
- Nobody should need a long tutorial before the first round.
- Rounds had to be short enough to fit between the end of a plate reader run and the start of the weekend.
- It could not reward whoever was fastest at tapping, because that would favor the younger members and make the older ones quietly disengage.
A multi-player iOS and Android game built around challenging friends seemed like a reasonable match. The pitch was simple: everyone joins the same room, the game asks questions or sets small challenges, and players compete against each other in real time. We were skeptical, but we agreed to try it for three Fridays and see whether anyone wanted to keep going.
How a typical session runs
Someone opens the app, creates a room, and shares a short code in our team chat. Within a minute or two, the whole group is in. Rounds are brief, and the pace is quick enough that nobody has time to overthink an answer. The format keeps the energy up without requiring anyone to be an expert in anything.
We have found that the best moments are not the scoreboard itself but the arguments that follow. A question about a fact nobody remembered leads to five minutes of people guessing out loud, and by the end someone is pulling up a reference on their phone. It is a surprisingly natural way to get people talking across seniority levels, which is harder to do in a formal lab meeting.
The middle-of-the-week version
Some of our group wanted something that did not feel like a game night at all, so we asked whether a lighter session could work on a Wednesday. We ended up reading through the public overview of how the game’s rounds and room settings are structured to decide which modes would be quick enough for a midweek break. The short answer was that the faster modes take only a few minutes and can be played during a coffee break without anyone feeling pulled away from work.
We did not use this to change anything about our research schedule. It was simply a practical way to decide which format fit our calendar, and it helped us avoid picking a mode that would stretch past fifteen minutes and cut into a timed assay.
Lessons for other research groups
If you are thinking about bringing a game into your own team, a few lessons from our experience may save you some trial and error:
- Keep the first session optional. Two of our members were hesitant at first. Letting them watch the first round before joining made the second week much easier.
- Check that everyone can join from their own device. Shared screens create bottlenecks and make people feel like spectators.
- Avoid rounds that shame wrong answers. In a lab, people already live with enough pressure from failed experiments. A game that celebrates good guesses works better than one that punishes mistakes.
- Agree on a time limit. We set a hard stop of twenty minutes so the session never cut into the end-of-day cleanup.
- Rotate who picks the mode. Giving each person a turn kept the sessions from feeling like one person’s preference.
Making it our own
Once the group was comfortable, our graduate student suggested a small custom twist: we began trading themed questions with each other. Some were about general laboratory practice, some about the history of solid-phase synthesis, and a few were deliberately silly. We kept the questions light and avoided anything that would turn a break into a study session. The point was to have fun, not to build a quiz that anyone would feel they needed to prepare for.
This kind of personalization is one reason the format has held up. The game gives you the structure, and your group supplies the content. Nobody has to become a game designer, but a little creativity goes a long way toward keeping people interested after the novelty wears off.
What we are still figuring out
We are not claiming that a phone game improves productivity or morale in any measurable way. We have not run a formal study, and we have no numbers to share. What we can say is that the group now looks forward to Friday, that the newer members have connected with the senior ones more quickly than we expected, and that the room feels a little less tense at the end of a hard week.
If you run a small research team and are looking for a shared activity that works across devices and experience levels, it may be worth a few test sessions. Set expectations, keep the rounds short, and pay attention to who is quiet. Those details matter more than the specific app.
Back to the bench
This blog will stay focused on peptide research, including synthesis methods, purification notes, and the practical questions that come up when you are working with sequences that do not behave the way the literature suggests. Occasional posts like this one reflect what happens around the work, not a change in direction. Thanks for reading, and good luck with your next run.
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