I’ve blown up so many Gimkit sessions that I should have a frequent-failure card at this point. Some activities sounded brilliant at 10 p.m. on a Thursday and then detonated spectacularly at 9:15 a.m. on a Friday when the Wi-Fi hiccuped and half the kids were still looking for their Chromebook chargers. After literally hundreds of trials, only seven multiplayer setups have survived the teenage chaos test. These are the ones my students beg for by name, and that still produce actual learning when the fire alarm randomly goes off mid-game.
Here they are, ranked by how often I actually use them.
1. Trust No One – Small Teams, One Traitor (my default Friday activity now)
Setup: 4–5 kids per team, one randomly chosen traitor whose job is to tank the team score without getting caught.
Why it’s perfect:
- The quiet kids suddenly become the loudest because paranoia makes everyone talk.
- The traitor has to get questions wrong in a believable way, which forces them to actually know the right answer first.
- I run it with my Spanish 2 vocab kit (87 questions). Last month, Diego spent twenty-two minutes pretending to be terrible at -ar preterite verbs only to accidentally betray himself on a reflexive question and get exiled to the corner for the rest of the period. The entire class still talks about “Diego’s Fall.” Learning + drama = memory cement.
Pro move: Turn on “Show correct answers after each question” so the traitor can’t just spam wrong answers forever.
2. Classic Mode – Boys vs Girls (yes, I’m basic and it still slaps)
Every single time I say, “Boys versus girls, winner gets to leave thirty seconds early for lunch,” the energy becomes illegal.
I don’t care if it’s 2025 and gender is a construct; teenagers will sell their grandparents for a thirty-second head start to the cafeteria.
Last year, the girls were down by $11 million with four minutes left. Sofia hit a 38-question streak, bought three 10x multipliers in a row, and they won by $400k. The boys still haven’t recovered. I didn’t teach a single new thing that day, but they remembered every imperfect subjunctive trigger for the rest of the year because they associated it with sweet, sweet victory.
3. Boss Battle – Tournament Bracket Style
I run this once per semester as a two-day extravaganza.
Day 1: Four separate Boss Battle games during the period (I float between four different kit links). Winners from each game advance.
Day 2: Final four teams, one monster kit with 120 questions, winner takes the trophy (a $6 plastic unicorn from Amazon that lives on my desk).
The energy is March Madness, but for direct object pronouns. I live-stream the final round on my projector while the other classes watch from the hallway like it’s the Super Bowl. Administration pretends to be mad but secretly loves the hallway traffic because everyone’s quiet and watching Spanish.
4. Humans vs Zombies – Partnered Survival
Every pair starts as humans. When one partner gets a question wrong, both become zombies and can only earn points by infecting others (answering faster than a human team).
It’s beautiful chaos.
The strongest pairs protect the weakest ones because they know one wrong answer dooms them both. I’ve watched honor-roll kids literally stand up and coach struggling partners through stem-changing verbs because their survival depended on it. That’s the kind of collaboration that never happens when I just say “work with your partner.”
5. Relay Race Classic (no devices needed for half the kids)
Half the class plays on devices, half stands at the board with markers.
The device kid answers a question → runs to the board kid → tells them the English meaning → board kid has to write the correct Spanish infinitive + conjugation before the next question loads.
It’s loud, it’s messy, markers fly everywhere, someone always knocks over a desk, and they learn more in twenty minutes than in three days of notes. I only do this when I have a sub because it’s impossible to explain in writing.
6. Trust No One – Teachers vs Students (the nuclear option)
Once a year, on the day before winter break, I join as a player with my teacher avatar (“Señor Davis – Admin Privileges”).
I spend the entire game buying Freeze on the top three leaders and dropping betrayal bombs.
The screams when I betray the kid who’s been talking trash for fifteen minutes are heard three hallways away.
We raised $340 for the local animal shelter last December because I promised to donate $1 for every million points the students beat me by. They crushed me by 87 million. Worth every penny.
7. Silent Classic – Headphones Only, Chat Off (the one I use when admin is observing)
This is the “look how calm and academic we are” version that still feels like a multiplayer game.
Everyone wears headphones, music off, volume at 50%. They can only communicate by holding up fingers for cash amounts or mouthing “buy multiplier.”
It looks like a library from the doorway, but inside their heads, it’s the damn Hunger Games. Perfect for formal observations or when the class next door is testing.
The Two Multiplayer Ideas That Died Horrible Deaths (So You Don’t Try Them)
- Whole-class one device hot potato
Sounded fun. Ended with a cracked Chromebook screen and tears. - Draw That team mode
Twenty minutes of “wait, is that supposed to be comer or correr?” and zero content learned.
Final Setup Tips That Took Me Years to Learn
- Always start the game yourself and join as the first player so you control the pacing.
- Keep games between 18 and 28 minutes. Anything longer and the shop becomes irrelevant.
- Never combine Trust No One with Boss Battle. The universe cannot handle that much betrayal.
- Have a physical prize ready, even if it’s just a single Jolly Rancher for the winning team. The sugar rush is worth the five bucks.
These seven activities are the only ones that have survived full classes of seniors on the last day before prom, freshman boys who think fart jokes are a personality, and that one period where literally everyone forgot their devices.
They work because they turn review into social currency. Kids don’t remember the vocab word because I told them to; they remember it because Kayla betrayed Miguel on the word “desayunar,” and he still brings it up in the hallway six months later.
That’s the real multiplayer magic of Gimkit: it makes the content worth fighting for.
Try number one or number two tomorrow.
Your kids will thank you, and you’ll finally understand why some of us are willing to fight tech directors to keep the site unblocked.
It’s worth the war.