I’m the teacher who still has nightmares about the “Trust No One” lobby music.
I’m also the teacher whose eighth-graders once screamed so loudly during Floor Is Lava that the principal walked in thinking someone had fallen off a chair.
After four straight years of running Gimkit almost weekly, across three different preps and roughly 600 kids, I can tell you exactly which modes are pure magic, which ones are secretly evil, and which ones you should only touch if you hate yourself and want to lose instructional minutes forever.
Here’s the real, no-filter ranking from someone who has seen every possible reaction a 13-year-old can have to a virtual snowball.
1. Trust No One (The undisputed king. Fight me.)
This mode is crack cocaine disguised as formative assessment.
If you’ve never played it, everyone joins anonymously with fake names. You answer questions to earn knives. Every 90 seconds or so, a “meeting” happens, and you vote someone out. If the group votes correctly, the impostor loses all their knives. If you vote wrong, an innocent player gets eliminated, and the impostor keeps stacking.
My first time running it, I had a kid literally stand on his chair and yell, “IT’S ETHAN, I SAW HIM MISS THE PHOTOSYNTHESIS QUESTION,” while Ethan, red-faced, tried to defend himself with, “Bro, I just fat-fingered it!”
Thirty seconds later, the entire class chanted “EJECT ETHAN” in perfect unison.
We reviewed cell organelles that day better than any textbook diagram ever could.
Pro tips from the trenches:
- Use 20–25 questions max. Longer kits drag the meetings out and kill momentum.
- Turn power-ups OFF. They completely break the balance and make it impossible to tell who’s actually good.
- Let them pick their own fake names. The chaos of seeing “Big Chungus” accuse “Your Mom” of missing the quadratic formula question is worth the slight maturity dip.
- If you have a quiet class, seed one or two obviously wrong answers yourself under a fake name. Nothing gets shy kids talking like righteous betrayal.
Downside? Takes a solid 35–40 minutes if you let it breathe. Not a quick-do. But academically, it’s the single most effective mode I’ve ever used.
2. Floor Is Lava (Pure adrenaline. Zero chill.)
Picture this: questions appear one at a time for the whole class. Everyone answers on their own screen. If you get it wrong, your little character drops into the lava, and you’re out until the next question.
The last person standing on the platform wins the round.
I run this the day before winter break, and it sounds like a sports bar during overtime.
What actually happens educationally is fascinating: kids who normally rush and guess start triple-checking their answers because the cost of being wrong is public humiliation by molten death. I’ve watched my weakest math students suddenly remember order of operations because they don’t want to be the first one to fall.
Real story: Last year, Diego—sweet kid, usually checks out during review—was the last one standing against three honors kids in a 7th-period geometry class. When he won, the room exploded. He told me later, “Mr. C, I never knew I could beat them at something.” That moment is why we teach.
Use it when:
- You have a smaller class (under 28 works best—too many people and it ends too fast).
- You want to reward accuracy over speed.
- You’re willing to lose your voice from narrating like a WWE announcer.
3. Humans vs. Zombies (The most underrated mode in Gimkit’s arsenal)
This one flies under the radar because it’s not as loud as the others, but hear me out.
Everyone starts as a human except two randomly selected zombies. Answer questions to earn “survival time.” Zombies earn points by tagging humans (which happens automatically when a human gets a question wrong while a zombie is “near” them in the ranking).
It’s basically infectious enthusiasm turned into a game loop.
The beautiful part? The best students become the most dangerous zombies, so struggling kids actually root for the strong players to miss questions. Suddenly, everyone is invested in everyone else’s accuracy.
I watched a girl who barely speaks English volunteer to read the next question aloud because she wanted her friend to stay human.
That’s the kind of classroom voodoo you can’t plan.
4. Classic Mode with Power-Ups Turned ON (Still great, but different animal)
Most people think of this as “default Gimkit,” but turning power-ups on changes everything.
Kids will hoard money to buy “Freeze” or “Streak Bonus” instead of answering quickly. It becomes less about pure knowledge and more about game theory.
I use this when I want them to feel clever, not just correct.
One kid last month saved up 1.2 million (yes, million) and dropped a 10x multiplier in the last 30 seconds to steal first place from the usual top student. The scream that came out of him was primordial.
It’s not the best for pure review, but it’s incredible for building perseverance and strategic thinking.
5. Team Mode (Good when you need it, chaos when you don’t)
I love teams when I have an odd number of kids or when I want them talking to each other instead of me.
But here’s the dirty secret: half the teams spend the whole game arguing about which power-up to buy instead of answering questions. I’ve seen groups with 400,000 points because they kept buying “Insurance” over and over again, like it was crypto in 2021.
Still, when it works, it’s magic. Pair strong with weak deliberately and watch the mentoring happen in real time.
6. Snowbrawl (Seasonal, but legitimately fun)
Only available around Christmas, but easily the best seasonal mode they’ve ever released.
You chuck snowballs at other players to steal their points. Accuracy is based on how fast you answer correctly.
It’s basically GoldenEye 64 in the classroom.
The sound of thirty snowballs hitting someone simultaneously is something I hope I never forget.
7. Capture the Flag (Fine, but exhausting)
Takes forever, kids get obsessed with defending their flag instead of answering questions, and someone always cries when their flag gets stolen in the last ten seconds.
I’ve used it exactly twice. Both times ended in minor chaos.
8. Infinity Mode (a.k.a. Teacher Torture Device)
Never ends. Literally never.
Do not turn this on unless you want to be stuck in the same Gimkit for three straight days while kids beg for “just one more round.”
I made this mistake in 2022. We’re still not over it.
9. Don’t Look Down (Hard skip unless your kids are saints)
The platform slowly disappears. If you stop answering, you fall off.
Sounds intense. In reality, half the class gives up once they fall and start watching TikTok under their desk.
The engagement drop-off is brutal.
The One Mode I Will Never Touch Again: Big Brain
I’m not even ranking it because it doesn’t deserve the dignity.
It forces kids to answer progressively harder questions without getting any wrong, or they drop back to easier ones.
Sounds smart. Feels like academic hazing.
I had a girl cry because she got stuck on a level 7 question about the Treaty of Versailles while everyone else was still on level 3.
Never again.
Final Verdict From the Trenches
If I could only use one mode for the rest of my career, it’s Trust No One. Nothing else even comes close to the level of investment, discussion, and raw academic performance I see from it.
But the real answer is: rotate them.
Start the unit with Classic or Humans vs. Zombies to build knowledge.
Mid-unit, hit them with Floor Is Lava for accuracy pressure.
End with Trust No One as the boss fight.
Your kids will hate you, love you, and accidentally learn everything in the process.
And if anyone from Gimkit is reading this: please, for the love of all that is holy, make Trust No One available year-round, not just “featured.”
Some of us have standards to pretend we’re meeting.