The wheel decides our next move

I was handed the phone with the wheel already loaded up. The room was a mix of new faces and people who only knew each other from emails. You could feel that quiet, polite tension in the air, everyone just a little too aware of being on their best behavior.

That collective lean-in

I gave the wheel a tap on the screen. The whirring sound it made was silly, but it did the trick. Every single person in the circle leaned forward just a bit, their eyes locked on the spinning colors.It wasn't about winning anything. It was the shared suspense of not knowing what silly thing we'd have to do next. The silence broke into a few scattered laughs as it slowed down, everyone guessing where it might land.

The awkwardness just evaporated

It landed on 'Share a weird pizza topping you love.' The first person to go, someone from accounting I think, said 'pineapple and jalapeño.' And instead of judgement, there was this wave of 'Oh, I've tried that!' and 'No way, really?'Suddenly, we weren't just colleagues or acquaintances. We were people arguing about whether anchovies belong anywhere near a pizza. The next spin led to a two-truths-and-a-lie, and the stories that came out were hilariously bad, in the best way.You could see shoulders relaxing. The formal postures melted away. Conversations started branching off on their own, sparked by whatever ridiculous prompt the wheel had chosen for us.

Left with just the easy chatter

By the time we put the wheel away, the dynamic in the room had completely shifted. The initial stiffness was gone, replaced by the kind of noise that comes from a dozen overlapping conversations.No one was a stranger anymore. We were just a bunch of people who now knew each other's most embarrassing karaoke songs and questionable food opinions. The rest of the evening just flowed naturally from there, all that initial awkwardness completely forgotten.