Work Dinner
Solo challenge. Estimated time: two to three hours. Using a Negroni and up to two glasses of Malbec, get through pre-appetizer chitchat, group ordering, salad, entrées, dessert, all the way to the Uber ride home, without oversharing or otherwise saying anything that will result in an emotional hangover the next morning. Pretend to care about your senior manager’s “really funny story” while making sure you obtain at least one crostini before Bob grabs his third. Navigate a series of short, overlapping, half-shouted conversations across the table while trying to remember the names of peoples’ kids and dogs and not being derailed by the weird vibes emanating from that one woman in Marketing who always wears a turtleneck. Expert mode: same challenge, no wine.

Thursday-Afternoon Budgeting Zoom
Group challenge. Estimated time: one hour. Test your hand-eye coördination and deception skills by maneuvering open windows on your desktop background, answering e-mails and texts and looking at Instagram, all while appearing to be engaged. Extra points for unmuting to chime in occasionally with enthusiastic agreement. Automatic fail if at any point the audio from a pop-up ad blares extremely loud for half a second while you’re unmuted, requiring everyone to pretend they didn’t hear it while trying to guess who it was.

Playdate for Dads
Work as a team alongside three to four other dads, progressing through a series of short conversations about pro sports, college sports, kids (and their sports), while avoiding eye contact, politics, and any hint of emotional vulnerability, and each of you drinking a beer as quickly as possible without being obvious about it. Final challenge: make open-ended plans to grab lunch sometime, knowing it won’t happen until your spouses schedule another thing that forces you all together again. Successful completion is driving away, in your own separate cars, unaware that you are each listening to the National or James Blake and maybe even crying a little, you don’t know why, doesn’t mean anything, just sometimes feels good to cry a little, O.K.?

Friend-Group Scope Creep
Couples’ challenge. Ideal for introvert-extrovert pairings. Work together with your partner to set boundaries on your friend group. Develop a strategy to selectively accept or turn down invitations while avoiding hurting anyone’s feelings and not filling up your entire calendar with events that you’re going to feel anxious about. If you’re the introvert, navigate intra-couple tension with your partner over the right amount of elective, non-work socializing with people who, seen one way, are effectively strangers but, seen another way, are just humans looking for connection. To escape this room, you’ll need to answer the central riddle: Where does it end? Friends of friends? Friends of friends of friends? And so on to infinity? Is everyone a potential friend? You like them, you really do, but at some point, there is a limited number of holiday cards in your standard order. And also, you have only so many chairs.

4 a.m. Thoughts
Solo challenge. Estimated time: one to three hours. Use breathing, mindfulness, gratitude, distraction, pretending you might get up and go for a run, any coping mechanism available, to escape your own head and get to sunrise without spiralling. Bonus points if you don’t wake up your spouse. Extra challenge: don’t look at your phone.

Cutting Each Other Off
Couples’ challenge. Estimated time: one to fifty years (if you’re lucky). Work as a team to develop habits of patience, attentive verbal communication, listening all the way to the end of someone’s sentence, and not jumping in as soon as you think you know what they’re going to say, or becoming distracted by a text, or thinking about what you’re going to say while they are still talking. Bonus: completion results in a deep, sustaining love for your partner.

Warming Earth
Group challenge. Starting now, work with other nations on a collective-action problem.

Saṃsāra
Let yourself sit with a series of unanswerable questions. Hard mode: in the endless cycle of desire, self-absorption, and suffering, seek ways to live with kindness and compassion.

Escape Room
An actual escape room, your H.R. manager’s idea of a fun team-building exercise. Before dismissing this activity or just trying to get through it, recognize your tendency to view nearly everything as a situation from which to extricate yourself as quickly and painlessly as possible. Take a moment to appreciate your co-workers, even Bob and turtleneck lady. In khakis and fleeces with the company logo, stay in the moment, work as a team to get to the outside, where your ultimate reward awaits: a glass of Malbec and a basket of cold fries. ♦