For the five minutes while everyone is still finding their seats.

Rock paper scissors, played by a whole room at once. People choose on their phones, get matched head to head against somebody else in the crowd, and a leaderboard fills up over a few rounds.

Nobody explains anything

There is no other game here where that is completely true. Everyone in the room learned these rules as a child, in whatever country they grew up in, and they have not changed since. No round gets lost to somebody working out what they are meant to be doing.

The host presses start, and that is the job

Matchmaking, scoring and the leaderboard run without anyone touching them. Most games here need somebody to read something out, judge an answer or keep things moving. This one does not, which is exactly why it fits the slot where you are busy doing something else.

If you want to feel like you are hosting, this is the wrong pick, and several others here will give you that.

It gets better the bigger the room is

A few hundred people all throwing at the same moment makes its own noise, and that noise is the whole effect. With eight people around a table you would be better off just using your hands.

You can change what the three things are

Swap the shapes for your own icons, images or branding. Three of your products, three department mascots, three things from the conference. What beats what stays the same, so nobody has to relearn anything, it just stops looking like a stock game.

What it is not

A main event. This is four or five minutes, and it is very good at four or five minutes: a break while the room fills, a warm-up before the real game, a wind-down at the end when everyone has had enough. It is also the cheapest game in the library to run, which is the right price for the job it does.