Name a trait you share with your mother? The oddest item you’ve gotten for free? Did you like prom?

You could pay for a deck or app filled with these questions, and myriad variations on them — schoolyard anecdotes and bucket lists, cherished Halloween costumes and your least favorite smells — all designed to save you from stale conversations. Conversation starter games promise to salvage your holidays, meetings and dates from chatter about the weather.

They can also help you say goodbye to your routine office icebreaker. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted on Instagram earlier this year that her weekly staff meetings start with a deck of conversation-starter cards.

“I usually say too much,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez wrote in an Instagram story in May, above a photo of a card with the prompt: “Tell me about a time when your life felt abundant.” The game helps her team understand each other, she wrote, and bond “on a more meaningful, human level for a few minutes a week.”

Many of these games are sweepingly broad in their focus. TableTopics, one of the earliest conversation starter decks, asks questions like, “Have you ever been escorted out by security?” and “What topic do you know more about than anyone else in the room?” The game has sold 3.5 million copies.