Most ice breakers fail for the same reason. You ask the room a question out loud, and answering it means speaking first, in front of everyone, before anyone knows how the session is going to go. Two extroverts answer. Everybody else waits. Ask the same question on their phones and the whole room answers in ten seconds, because nobody has to go first.
Going round the room is not one question, it is one question asked thirty times. In a team of eight it eats ten minutes. At a conference it is not possible at all, so the session opens cold instead. And it is not the same question by the time it reaches the end: the first three answers set the register, and everyone after them adjusts to it. Asking privately and all at once fixes both problems. It takes the same ten seconds whether there are eight people in the room or four hundred, and the answers are not shaped by whoever happened to be sitting nearest the front.
A running order for the start of a session, with the poll type that suits each answer. You would not run all six — one and two are plenty for a weekly team meeting, and three to six are for a workshop or a conference session where the room does not know each other yet.
The opener, and the best argument for doing this at all. One word takes three seconds to type, so everyone answers — and the cloud builds on screen while they do it. Watching 'tired' get bigger is the moment a room finds out it is not just them.
Deliberately trivial. The second question exists to prove the first was not a fluke — everyone can answer it, it takes one tap, and the bar chart gets a laugh. Save the meaningful question for when the room is already answering.
One tap, and the most useful thing you will learn in the first two minutes. A room averaging two out of five needs a shorter session than the one you planned, and it is better to find that out now than at the end.
The conference-scale ice breaker. Collect a fact from a few people beforehand and make a round of it. Scoring it puts a leaderboard on the big screen between questions, which is what turns an ice breaker into something people lean forward for. Switch on the screen name prompt in your session settings first — it is off by default, and it is asked at the door, so a room that joined without it gets a leaderboard of scores with nobody's name against them.
The one that changes the session. Nobody says this out loud to a room of strangers, and nobody writes it in the feedback form either, because by then it is too late to matter. Anonymous and asked at the start, you can still do something about it.
An ice breaker that also writes the agenda. Ranking beats a vote here because a session with four equally important topics has no plan, and the room has just told you which one they came for.
The code is the ice breaker. People get their phones out, type the seven digits and are already participating before the first question lands. Explaining the exercise first and then asking them to join wastes the momentum.
The first question sets what effort feels normal. Ask for a sentence and half the room decides it is not worth it. Ask for one word and you get everyone, which is what you actually wanted — the answers matter far less than the fact that all of them arrived.
Tea or coffee is not the point. It is the rehearsal. A room that has already answered one harmless question will answer the honest one thirty seconds later, and a room that has not, will not.
The worst version of this is a word cloud that appears and is ignored. Read one word off it out loud, or point at the split and say what it tells you. Twenty seconds, and it is the difference between an ice breaker and a warm-up nobody understood the purpose of.
There is no sign-in, and no name is attached to an answer — not on the screen, and not in the CSV you export afterwards. The one exception is a quiz screen name, if you switch it on before anyone joins: it appears on the leaderboard beside a score, and nowhere else. That is why the energy question gets an honest number. A room of strangers will tell you they are running on empty. They will not tell you that with their name on it.
Every question above, ready to edit into your own room. Put the join code on the slide and answers come in from whatever people already have in their hands.
Retro questions the quiet half of the team will actually answer
Make the decision in the room, not in the thread afterwards
Brainstorming that collects ideas from the whole room, not the three people who like talking
Let the question everyone is thinking get asked without anyone having to own it
Training feedback that names the step where the room lost you
Measure what a course changed, not whether the room enjoyed it