Awkward Moment at Work

We’ve all been there. Embarrassing slips of the tongue, wardrobe malfunctions, secret (and not-so-secret) workplace romances, accidental emails, bathroom mishaps, copy room shenanigans. Awkward Moment® at Work is the party game that helps you play out those all-too-familiar moments — and show them who’s boss!

Each turn, players try to impress “the Decider” by submitting the best reaction to the awkward moment from their hands of cards.

Awkward Moment at Work is the adult version of our award-winning card game Awkward Moment. While the game’s awkward workplace situations may be unfamiliar to kids and teens, the game is family friendly (contains nothing you wouldn’t see in a PG-13 movie).

Game Contents:

• 69 Moment Cards
• 100 Reaction Cards
• 17 Decider Cards
• Game Instructions

Awkward Moment at Work features three decks of cards:

• Moment Cards: Moment Cards pose hypothetical situations to which players respond.
• Reaction Cards:Reaction Cards provide players with possible responses to the awkward situations presented by Moment Cards
• Decider Cards: each Decider Card gives the Decider a guideline to use to select the winning reaction

Players each receive five Reaction Cards. The first Decider flips one Moment Card and one Decider Card and reads them to the group. Each player submits a face down Reaction Card in response to the Moment and Decider Card on the table. The Decider shuffles the submitted cards, reads them to the group, and picks a winner by interpreting the Decider Card’s rule. The winner keeps this round’s Moment Card. Each player draws a new Reaction Card and the player to the Decider’s left becomes the next Decider.

Awkward Moment at Work was developed as part of a National Science Foundation-funded project called “Transforming Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) For Women and Girls: Reworking Stereotypes & Bias.” The grant has allowed Tiltfactor, with additional assistance from the National Girls Collaborative Project, to research and create a number of games, with designs informed by psychological theory and research, aimed at reducing gender bias and broadening participation in STEM. Research on Awkward Moment at Work suggests that the game has the greatest impact on players’ motivation to acknowledge and overcome bias when it “intermixes” bias-related and neutral moments, but arouses psychological resistance (and thus has the least efficacy) when it presents an imbalanced majority of bias-related moments.