Designing the perfect pub quiz

I’ve been playing pub quizzes for a number of years now, sometimes as many as four a week. I’ve also occasionally hosted and written pub quizzes, and learnt there’s a right way and wrong way to do it.

Don’t make it too difficult or too easy.

Unless you’re writing questions for a quiz league (in which case you’ll probably learn nothing new from this post), you should assume the people playing your quiz will be of mixed abilities. Questions shouldn’t be too obscure as to make people give up, nor too easy that there is no challenge. Go through your potential questions and rate them out of difficulty from one to five, and then throw away all the ‘ones’ and ‘fives’, leaving you with a spread of the middle ground.

There are exceptions to every rule, of course, and it’s common to have your first question easy so everyone in the room has a good chance of getting at least one point. Also, obscure / hard questions are good if the answer is either interesting or funny. e.g. In the brewing process, wort contains the amino acids that provide what lucky, rich element to the yeast? Boring (Answer: Nitrogen). What mammal has fingerprints so indistinguishable from humans that they have occasionally been wrongfully collected as evidence at crime scenes? Interesting (Answer: Koalas). What did the ancient Romans use as a mouthwash? Funny (Answer: Urine). Even if a player gets a question wrong, if you elicit an ‘ooh’ or an ‘ahh’ out of them when the answer is revealed, you have them engaged and enjoying your quiz.

Balance is important.

I can’t stress this point too much as imbalance in quizzes has been the reason I’ve given up on a few. Unless you’re creating a specialist quiz like Eurovision or Disney, you should make sure you are not bias towards one category of question. For instance, if you have five questions about football and just one on history, you’ve got the mix wrong.

The categories for Trivial Pursuit are as good place as any to get your broad section headings: Geography, Entertainment, History, Art & Literature, Science & Nature, Sport & Leisure. Go through your questions and try to get as close to the same number of each category as possible. Then go through and see if you’re awarding more points for a single question (such as a point for the name of a song and another point for the band), and whether that gives any category too much of an advantage.

I once went to a quiz which had 40 questions, but the last ten were all music clips worth two point each. Since I’m on the wrong side of 50, my knowledge of pop music beyond 1990 is limited, so needless to say I didn’t do well in that round, and as it accounted for 2/5ths of the total points, I never did well in that quiz. I gave up going after about four weeks.

The regulars that always win.

You will always have a team that are just better at quizzes than others. And those other teams may get to the point where they think ‘what’s the point?’ You can counter this in a couple of ways; firstly if they’re on a three-week winning streak (for instance, pick any number of weeks you fancy), on the fourth week they must split their team (not always a great solution if the always-winning team is a solo player). A second method is to given them a handicap that is equal to the number of points they won by in the last quiz. So if they win the quiz by six points in week one, they start the next quiz they play as a team on minus six points. If they don’t win in week two, the handicap goes away (doesn’t matter if they skip a week, the handicap carries until they’ve absorbed it). This gives other teams more hope that they can have a shot at winning.

If they can find a way to cheat, they will.

The advent of the mobile phone has made it easier than ever to quickly find an answer to anything. But when I spot a player on an opposing team furtively tapping away on their screen, I despair. I know I can’t beat Google, but calling them out as a cheat is equally buzzkill during a quiz. Quiz hosts face an almost impossible task policing their events; but it should be made clear that all phones must be put away – not even left on the table, and if anyone is seen using a phone (regardless the reason), many points will be deducted. Hosts should walk around the room – especially in busy quizzes – and be seen to enforce the rules so that regulars know the chances of getting away with it are slim. One host I knew had an air horn that she would sound when a phone was spotted. It was a fun way of guilting the cheaters into honesty.

If your quiz has an audio round, beware. Apps like Shazam can tell you the name of a track and the artist on your watch without you even having to touch it. If you notice a player constantly checking the time during a music round; they’re probably cheating.

Mix up the format.

In order to keep your audience entertained, it’s worth bringing in elements that are not just question/answer. Some quizzes I’ve played have included games where one representative from each team competes to win either bonus points or steal from another team (the latter being a way you can avoid the best team winning each and every week). The games can be anything from throwing a paper aeroplane the furthest distance to hiding an object in the pub and seeing which team can find it first; but it should have a definitive winner rather than creative task such as making things out of tin foil which then is down to subjective opinion as to which is best (avoid those arguments as much as possible). Also, just as you wouldn’t ask the same question every week, don’t play the same games.

Don’t forget balance if including games. Those elements shouldn’t gain more points than any other category.

Make it worthwhile.

Whilst your goal is for everyone at your quiz to have a great night, you also want the prizes to be attractive. There are budgetary concerns, obviously, and you probably can’t afford to give away £400 every night, but you could build in a way that occasionally you give away £400. There are a couple of quizzes I go to regularly seemed to have cracked this problem. Rather than a guaranteed bar tab every week, the winning team is offered a choice of envelopes. In one is free entry to next week’s quiz for the team; in another a bottle of wine; in another half the jackpot; in another the whole jackpot and in the final envelope there is a cheese roll. The jackpot could be cash or a bar tab, but the point is if the winning envelope doesn’t get picked it rolls over to the next week and the jackpot can quickly climb.

Another option is to add an ancillary game after the quizzing is done. A good example of this is a Play Your Cards Right game where players must predict nine playing cards in a row being either higher or lower than the previous card without hitting a pair. Customers can buy raffle tickets for £1, and only three raffle tickets are drawn to play. All the cash for the raffle tickets goes into the prize pot and there’s no limit to the number of tickets a customer can buy; this way the jackpot can climb quite quickly.