How to host a trivia night

How many rounds and questions?

Five rounds of eight questions is a good first night: long enough for the lead to change hands, short enough to finish before people start leaving.

Trivia night rules to read out

Read these out before the first question, and put them on the screen:

1. Teams of four to six. No team bigger than six.
2. No phones for searching. Looking up an answer online gets the team's round scored zero.
3. One answer per question. If you change it, the last answer counts.
4. Answers are final when the timer ends.
5. Ties are broken with one number question: the closest guess wins.
6. The host's answer is final. Disputes go to the host at the break, not during the round.

Writing questions people enjoy

Start each question from an interesting answer and work back to a question that leads to it. Keep questions short, one idea each, and avoid trick wording; people enjoy getting a question right by thinking, not by reading carefully. Make every option plausible, so a team has to talk it through.

Climb the difficulty inside each round: two easy questions to start, so every team scores, and the hardest last. Match the themes to your crowd, check every fact twice, and read each question out loud before the night to catch anything that is easy to mishear.

You don't have to write everything yourself. Take rounds from the quiz library, or ask Granny to draft a round on a theme and check each question before you use it. For more, see how to write great quiz questions.

Scoring and tie-breakers

Keep scoring simple and visible. One point per correct answer is the classic pub-quiz rule; speed points, where faster correct answers score more, add pace when teams answer on phones. Decide before the night whether wrong answers lose points, and say so in the rules.

Show the standings after every round, because the race is what keeps the room in it. Prepare one tie-break question with a number answer, such as a year, a distance or a population, and give it to the tied teams only: the closest guess wins. Keep a second one in reserve in case two teams guess the same number.

Running it with phones instead of paper

Paper works, but marking answer sheets between rounds is the slowest part of any trivia night. With trivia night software, each team answers on one phone, with the team name as the nickname. The questions and the timer are on the big screen, points add up the moment the timer ends, and the leaderboard is ready after every round with nothing to mark.

Picture rounds become easy, because the image is on the screen for everyone. Late teams join with the room code and play from the next question, and a team whose phone dies rejoins and keeps its score. You keep the microphone and the jokes; the software keeps the score.