I built this because I needed it for my team.

Hi — I'm Anna. I've managed teams in tech for years, first at Amazon, now at GEICO.

I tried every “team event” platform out there and couldn't find one that fit the way I actually wanted to run trivia with my team — so I built my own. Something simple to host, something that helped my team bond, and something where everyone had a really good time laughing.

Kahoot means 15 minutes of dashboard-wrangling before anyone plays a round. Jackbox is $30 per title and each game has its own rules. Codenames Online works — if half your team is into word games. Escape rooms take three weeks of Slack-scheduling.

Every one of these asks your team to learn something before they can have fun. Most of them also ask you(the organizer) to do prep. That's why the “team event” gets pushed to next quarter, and the one after.

Every minute a manager invests in team culture runs into the same question: is this worth it? The research is unambiguous.

• Google Project Aristotle studied 180+ Google teams and found psychological safety is the single biggest predictor of team effectiveness — bigger than individual skill, seniority, or tenure.
• DORA / Accelerate research (Google Cloud, annual since 2014) finds elite engineering teams — which correlate strongly with high-trust culture — deploy software 973× more frequently and recover from incidents 6,570× faster than low-performing teams.
• Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School — who defined psychological safety — has demonstrated across peer-reviewed studies that high-safety teams report more learning behavior, fewer errors, and better performance.
• MIT Sloan research on team rituals consistently finds that repeated small shared moments build cohesion more reliably than one-off offsites.

The research above names the what (psychological safety, shared rituals, high-trust culture). Games are one of the highest-leverage ways to deliver the how:

• Games flatten hierarchy. In a trivia round, the intern who knows which pig Napoleon III banned can beat the VP. That reversal sticks — research on adult play (Stuart Brown, National Institute for Play) shows this is one of the fastest ways to dissolve perceived status barriers.
• Laughter is social glue.Shared laughter triggers endorphin release in a group — peer-reviewed work in evolutionary psychology finds it's more effective at building rapid group bonding than almost any other short-duration intervention.
• Games create stories.The intern who somehow knew all four phobias. The PM who was absolutely certain Harry Truman's middle name was Stephen. These stories get retold for months — they become the connective tissue of the team.
• Games are low-consequence reps.Psychological safety isn't built in one big offsite — it's built in dozens of small moments where someone was wrong, laughed it off, and no one held it against them. A trivia round produces 20+ of those moments in 10 minutes.

This is the mechanism BuggyTrivia is designed to exploit: fast reps of low-stakes shared play, with enough chaos that the outcome is unpredictable and everyone gets to be the hero at least once.