I don't enjoy answering most ice breaker questions, thus I was asked to come up with ice breaker questions for a large dinner gathering. Two groups were meeting for the first time. While members inside each group knew each other well, there were only a couple of people that knew individuals from the other group.
Rather than use just one question that everyone answered and give the last person twenty minutes to plan an answer, I used a variety of questions. People pulled a single question out of an orange sparkly hat (naturally) and had a choice to either answer the question or pass it to someone else at the table. Before picking a question, they could also decide to answer the question of the person immediately before them if they liked it, already had an answer, and/or wanted to play it completely safe.
Since it's a generally happy, upbeat, and introspective group, I went for questions that provided an opportunity to be positive and self-revealing without being embarrassing. And since you can NEVER have too many ice breaker questions, I'm sharing the list of them with you (and thanks to Amy Dixon for question 1 and Nancy Rosenow for question 9)!
All together, I think we used fourteen of the questions. I was last so I let a couple of people pick from among the last three questions to decide what I should answer.
If you want to use these, I'd suggest doing it with a group that's in a mood to be introspective. Based on the reactions, I don't think anyone had had enough liquor to readily tackle some of the questions. One example of that was the last words question. That elicited a lot of "ohhhhhhs." Quite honestly, I included it as a goof, because my ideal last words will be, "I knew it would come to this!"
If you decide to try these ice breaker questions, let me know how they work! - Mike Brown