I confess. Office Space is one of my all-time favorite movies. It came out in 1999, but I didn’t truly appreciate it until I saw it again in 2002 with coworkers from my first full-time job post-college. I worked for a mortgage company, where I answered the phone in a cubicle every day in English and Spanish. I was a genuine cubicle worker office drone.

In all honesty, I liked my job, but it did eventually become monotonous. Answer phone, give information, hang up phone, repeat, for anywhere from 80-120 times a day. Fortunately, like Peter in the movie, I did make a lot of friends (including my now wife), so I was never unhappy.

One way we’d break up the monotony was with games. It could be as simple as tossing a stress ball back and forth or stealing a certain pen off of someone’s desk – or as complicated as the Wikipedia 6 Degrees of Separation game. In fact, one day after work, we all got together and watched Office Space, and it became a favorite for us all. But little did I know that one day I would be holding in my hands The Office Space Game.

And sure enough, they did it. They captured the joy and creativity of our office games in one box with simple rules and the ability to play without risking your job. Here’s how it works.

Everyone gets 5 missions. They can be as simple as “Get someone to answer the phone for you” or as complicated as “Create a file with the name TPS report and get someone to open it and see the image of this card.” The goal is to successfully complete 3 missions before anyone else does. Additionally, there’s a foam squeaky red stapler (Milton would be proud) that can be stolen by anyone, and it counts as a sixth mission.

That’s it. It’s that simple. And that’s what makes it perfect.

Currently, I’m a partner at a law firm that I and my partner started almost a decade ago. We don’t really have time to stop work for an hour and play a game. If we did, it means something horrible has gone on and we need to reevaluate our business plan. However, with this game, I can work on a time-sensitive brief due to a judge, while the back of my mind plots how to get one of my cards into an envelope and have our associate open it up and find only the card. Or while I’m on hold with a courthouse waiting to find out whether a trial is still on the docket, I can craft a sneaky plan to have my partner go into the bathroom to “look at something” only to find the mission card sitting on the toilet seat. It’s harmless stress relief, and it’s brilliantly done.

Games at work can be tricky. We had to set ground rules immediately, as three attorneys playing against one another are naturally competitive, and adding our assistant to the mix made for a power imbalance. At least, so I thought. I didn’t factor in the fact that she’s the only one who normally comes and goes in our offices. This gave her the advantage with more than half the missions we tried out.

The printer? In her office. Phone calls? They all go through her. Envelopes? She has them all. She actually began with the upper hand. So we set ground rules ensuring that no missions would be done in front of clients or at the actual business’s expense. No making clients wait on hold or pretending to be a client when work for another client was being done. But since all the missions we tried could be planned and executed in a matter of 2-3 minutes or less, it was never an issue.

The reality is that this is a perfect game for a busy workplace. It was fun, fast, and with loose enough rules that we played it for days. Overall, The Office Space Game made for a perfect few days of fun. And the replayability is high… as I’m about to prove by handing out another set of cards to the office. Time for some more fun while we work.