The Running Order: Two Hours, Six Rounds, One Page
Run it in this order and the night paces itself. Round One is easy on purpose, so nobody feels stupid in the first ten minutes. Rounds Two to Five each reward a different kind of knowledge, which is what stops a single strong team running away with it. Round Six is meant to hurt, and it is where the standings actually change. Marking happens twice — once at half-time and once at the end — because marking after every round is the commonest reason a quiz night runs forty minutes long.
| Clock | What happens | Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| 7:30 | Teams settle, names collected, rules read out once | 10 |
| 7:40 | Round One — The Warm-Up (10 questions) | 12 |
| 7:52 | Round Two — Connections, Numbers and Wordplay (10) | 14 |
| 8:06 | Round Three — The Map Round (11) | 15 |
| 8:21 | Swap sheets, mark Rounds One to Three, read standings | 8 |
| 8:29 | Break | 12 |
| 8:41 | Round Four — Screen and Song (11) | 15 |
| 8:56 | Round Five — Food, Drink and the Everyday (10) | 12 |
| 9:08 | Round Six — The Decider (12) | 16 |
| 9:24 | Mark, tiebreaker if needed, announce the winner | 10 |
Team size decides more than the questions do. Four to six is the working range. A pair either happens to contain someone who knows the map round or it does not, so the specialist rounds land unfairly. Above six, the far end of the table stops contributing and starts talking, which is the noise that ruins a quiz for everyone else. Left with an odd number, make one team of seven rather than one of three.
Pacing. Read each question twice — once at normal speed, once slowly — then leave about twenty seconds and move on. Do not read it a third time however loudly the corner table asks, because the third reading becomes the expectation and adds fifteen minutes to the night. Longer questions in the map and decider rounds want closer to thirty seconds; the warm-up wants fifteen.
Scoring, announced once and never changed. One point per question, no half points, nothing for spelling, nothing deducted for a wrong guess. Teams swap sheets one table to the left so nobody marks their own, and you collect everything at the end to check the totals yourself. Read standings only twice, at half-time and at the end — a leaderboard after every round flattens the drama you are saving for Round Six.
The joker, if you want one. Each team may nominate one round to be scored double, declared in writing before that round's first question. It costs you nothing, it makes the break interesting, and it gives a team that bombed the warm-up a reason to stay. Most tables burn it on Round Four and regret it.
Kit. Pens, paper, a phone to read from, and nothing else. There is no picture round and no audio round here on purpose: the most common way a home or office quiz collapses is a music round that will not play through a laptop speaker. If you want more themes and variations on the format, there is a shorter set of them in our trivia night ideas, and if teams arrive without names, hand them our list of trivia team names while you collect the sheets.
Round One — The Warm-Up (10 Questions)
Start this round before the last team has finished at the bar. It is designed so that a competent table takes eight or nine of the ten, which is the point: confidence early makes people argue happily later. Read each question twice, leave fifteen seconds, and do not take questions from the floor.
Do not announce any scores after this round. The first standings you read out should already have the map round in them, so they mean something.
Q1.A standard chessboard is an eight-by-eight grid: how many individual squares does it contain?Tap to reveal
Answer: 64
Thirty-two of each colour. Asking for individual squares heads off the classic puzzle answer of 204, which counts squares of every size.
Q2.On a standard traffic light, which colour sits at the top?Tap to reveal
Answer: Red
Red is placed highest so it is visible first and remains identifiable to drivers who cannot distinguish the colours.
Q3.How many sides does an American stop sign have?Tap to reveal
Answer: Eight
It is an octagon, a shape reserved for stop signs so the instruction is readable from the back.
Q4.Which is the only US state whose name begins with the letter P?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pennsylvania
No other state starts with P, which is why this one appears on so many warm-up sheets.
Q5.In darts, what is the highest score possible with a single dart?Tap to reveal
Answer: 60
The treble twenty is worth 60; the bullseye is only 50.
Q6.Which month of the year has the fewest days?Tap to reveal
Answer: February
Twenty-eight days in a common year and twenty-nine in a leap year.
Q7.How many players does each team have on the field at kick-off in a football match?Tap to reveal
Answer: Eleven
Ten outfield players and a goalkeeper per side.
Q8.In tennis, what is the score called when both players reach forty?Tap to reveal
Answer: Deuce
From deuce a player must win two consecutive points to take the game.
Q9.On a QWERTY keyboard, which letter sits immediately to the right of G?Tap to reveal
Answer: H
The home row runs A, S, D, F, G, H, J, K, L — and most people have to mime it.
Q10.How many items are in a baker's dozen?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thirteen
The thirteenth loaf was the baker's insurance against being fined for selling underweight bread.
Round Two — Connections, Numbers and Wordplay (10 Questions)
This is the round that levels the room, and it is the reason a general-knowledge specialist cannot sweep the night. Almost nothing here can be recalled; it has to be worked out, which means the quiet person at the end of the table who does crosswords suddenly earns their seat. It is also the hardest round to look up on a phone, so if you are worried about cheating, this is the one to relax about.
Give these a full thirty seconds each and expect the noise level to rise — teams argue through this round rather than guessing in silence. Say clearly that anagram answers must be single words and that you will not confirm anything mid-round.
Q1.Odd one out: Mercury, Venus, Ceres, Mars. Which is not a planet?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ceres
Ceres is a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, reclassified in 2006; the other three are planets.
Q2.Rearrange the letters of OCEAN to give a small boat.Tap to reveal
Answer: Canoe
Both words use the same five letters, which is why this one lands quickly once someone says it aloud.
Q3.Which two letters are worth the most points in English-language Scrabble?Tap to reveal
Answer: Q and Z
Both score ten; J and X score eight.
Q4.Which four-letter word can go in front of FLY, FIGHTER and PLACE?Tap to reveal
Answer: Fire
Firefly, firefighter, fireplace — chain puzzles work best when the three endings come from different areas of life.
Q5.Odd one out: violin, viola, cello, trumpet. What do the other three share?Tap to reveal
Answer: Trumpet is the odd one out; the others are bowed string instruments
The trumpet is brass and blown, so it fails the test twice over.
Q6.What number is the Roman numeral CDXLIV?Tap to reveal
Answer: 444
CD is 400, XL is 40 and IV is 4, each written as a subtraction.
Q7.Rearrange the letters of LISTEN to give a word meaning quiet.Tap to reveal
Answer: Silent
A six-letter anagram that readers remember long after the night, and a useful one to read twice.
Q8.What is the next number in this sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8?Tap to reveal
Answer: 13
Each term is the sum of the two before it, which is the Fibonacci rule.
Q9.If today is Wednesday, what day of the week will it be in exactly 100 days?Tap to reveal
Answer: Friday
One hundred days is fourteen whole weeks plus two days, so you count two forward from Wednesday.
Q10.Which five-letter word for a small boat reads the same backwards as forwards?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kayak
It is a palindrome, and it is the answer teams reach after trying canoe again.
Round Three — The Map Round (11 Questions)
Geography is the fairest hard round there is, because partial knowledge still scores: a team that cannot name the country can often name the continent and talk itself the rest of the way. Expect this round to produce your first real spread of scores, and put it last before the break so the standings you read out have teeth.
Avoid the temptation to add a blank map handout. It doubles your printing, halves your reading pace, and the answers below work perfectly well spoken. Accept any recognisable spelling — Vaduz in particular will arrive on sheets in four or five versions.
Q1.The Khyber Pass links which two countries?Tap to reveal
Answer: Afghanistan and Pakistan
The pass cuts through the Spin Ghar mountains and has been the main overland route between the two for centuries.
Q2.Which sea lies between Italy and the Balkan Peninsula?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Adriatic
It separates the Italian peninsula from Croatia, Montenegro and Albania, and feeds into the Ionian Sea.
Q3.Which country is completely surrounded by Italy, apart from Vatican City?Tap to reveal
Answer: San Marino
San Marino is landlocked within Italy near Rimini and is one of the world's oldest republics.
Q4.Lake Victoria borders which three countries?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya
Africa's largest lake by surface area is divided chiefly between Tanzania and Uganda, with a smaller Kenyan share.
Q5.Which country occupies the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Dominican Republic
Haiti occupies the western third of the same island.
Q6.Which four US states meet at the point known as Four Corners?Tap to reveal
Answer: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah
It is the only place in the United States where four states touch at a single point.
Q7.What is the capital of Liechtenstein?Tap to reveal
Answer: Vaduz
Vaduz sits on the Rhine between Switzerland and Austria and has a population in the thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.
Q8.The Gobi Desert covers large parts of which two countries?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mongolia and China
It stretches across southern Mongolia and northern China, and is a cold desert rather than a sandy one.
Q9.Which is the fourth largest island in the world?Tap to reveal
Answer: Madagascar
Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo are larger; Australia is counted as a continental landmass rather than an island.
Q10.How many time zones does Russia span?Tap to reveal
Answer: Eleven
The country runs from Kaliningrad in the west to Kamchatka in the east across eleven zones.
Q11.In which city is the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony held?Tap to reveal
Answer: Oslo
Alfred Nobel's will assigned the peace prize to Norway; the other Nobel prizes are awarded in Stockholm.
Round Four — Screen and Song, No Speakers Needed (11 Questions)
This is the round the whole table contributes to, including the person who has spent the last hour on their phone, and it is the round most teams waste their joker on. Everything here is written, so you need no clips, no projector and no awkward silence while someone finds the right cable.
Weight it towards things that ran for decades or stayed in circulation rather than whatever finished streaming last month, because a quiz that turns on a recent release punishes half the room. One answer here reliably starts an argument: the Pulp Fiction briefcase. Its contents are never revealed on screen, so if a team writes in a theory, give them the point for the film title and nothing for the theory.
Q1.Which 1994 film is told out of chronological order and features a briefcase whose contents are never shown?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pulp Fiction
Quentin Tarantino's screenplay reorders the chapters so a character killed mid-film appears alive at the end.
Q2.In the musical West Side Story, which two gangs are at war?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Jets and the Sharks
The rivalry transplants Romeo and Juliet's Montagues and Capulets to New York's Upper West Side.
Q3.Which Alfred Hitchcock film confines James Stewart to a wheelchair watching his neighbours across a courtyard?Tap to reveal
Answer: Rear Window
The whole film is shot from the apartment, which is why it is still taught as an exercise in restricted viewpoint.
Q4.Simon and Garfunkel's song Mrs Robinson grew out of music used in which 1967 film?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Graduate
Mrs Robinson is the character played by Anne Bancroft opposite Dustin Hoffman, and the finished single followed in 1968.
Q5.Which instrument did the jazz musician John Coltrane play?Tap to reveal
Answer: The saxophone
Chiefly tenor and soprano saxophone, on records including A Love Supreme.
Q6.Which band released the 1966 album Pet Sounds, which opens with Wouldn't It Be Nice?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Beach Boys
Brian Wilson built the record in the studio while the rest of the band was touring.
Q7.In The Sound of Music, what is the surname of the family the governess joins?Tap to reveal
Answer: Von Trapp
The film is loosely based on the memoir of Maria von Trapp.
Q8.Which animated television family lives in Quahog, Rhode Island?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Griffins, in Family Guy
Quahog is named after the hard-shell clam of the New England coast.
Q9.Which instrument is Yo-Yo Ma celebrated for playing?Tap to reveal
Answer: The cello
His recordings of the Bach cello suites are the usual route by which people first hear his name.
Q10.Who composed the opera The Marriage of Figaro?Tap to reveal
Answer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Premiered in Vienna in 1786, with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte.
Q11.Which British television talent show, launched in 2001, was the format that American Idol was based on?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pop Idol
Simon Fuller's format was exported the following year and spawned Idol series worldwide.
Round Five — Food, Drink and the Everyday (10 Questions)
Put this round after the heavyweight screen round and watch the room relax. It is the round where the team that has scored nothing all night suddenly takes seven, because everyone cooks, everyone drinks something, and nobody needs a specialism to have an opinion about rhubarb. Keep it moving: fifteen to twenty seconds a question is plenty.
Two answers here are worth a line of explanation when you read them out. Rhubarb leaves really are not eaten — they contain oxalic acid in quantities that make them a bad idea — so the answer is the stalk and nothing else. And American proof is exactly twice the alcohol by volume, which means an 80-proof bottle is 40 per cent alcohol; British proof historically used a different scale entirely, so if someone objects they are not wholly wrong.
Q1.Which spirit forms the base of a mojito?Tap to reveal
Answer: White rum
Rum, lime, sugar, mint and soda; a dark rum makes a different drink.
Q2.The word avocado derives from ahuacatl, a word from which language?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nahuatl
Nahuatl was the language of the Aztec empire and also gave English chocolate and tomato.
Q3.What is the name for the sediment left at the bottom of a bottle or barrel of wine?Tap to reveal
Answer: The lees
Dead yeast and grape solids; wine left deliberately in contact with them is described as aged sur lie.
Q4.How many fluid ounces are there in a US pint?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sixteen
A UK pint is twenty British fluid ounces, which is why the two pints are not the same size.
Q5.Which vegetable is the main ingredient of the Spanish cold soup gazpacho?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tomato
Modern gazpacho is tomato-based with cucumber, pepper, garlic, oil and bread, though earlier versions had no tomato at all.
Q6.Gouda cheese takes its name from a city in which country?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Netherlands
Gouda is a city in South Holland where the cheese was traded rather than necessarily made.
Q7.On an American spirits label, what does the proof number equal?Tap to reveal
Answer: Twice the alcohol by volume
An 80-proof whiskey is 40 per cent alcohol by volume.
Q8.Capers, used in sauces and on smoked fish, are which part of a plant?Tap to reveal
Answer: The flower buds
They are the unopened buds of the caper bush, picked and then pickled or salted.
Q9.Which part of the rhubarb plant is eaten?Tap to reveal
Answer: The stalk
The leaves contain enough oxalic acid to make them unpalatable and unwise to eat.
Q10.Which Japanese dish consists of thinly sliced raw fish served without rice?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sashimi
Sushi is defined by its seasoned rice, which is precisely what sashimi does not have.
Round Six — The Decider (12 Questions)
Announce this round by name and warn the room that it is meant to hurt. A leading team taking six of the twelve is doing well; a team taking nine has almost certainly won the night. Because the scores are low, this is the round where positions actually change, which is why it is worth marking this one yourself at the front rather than trusting swapped sheets.
Spread across science, numbers and the past on purpose, so that no single specialist clears it. Give thirty seconds each and read the harder answers slowly enough for a marker to keep up. If you want a whole night at this pitch rather than one round, our collection of hard trivia questions is built for rooms that have asked for it.
Q1.Which is the only number whose English letters appear in alphabetical order?Tap to reveal
Answer: Forty
F, O, R, T, Y runs in sequence; one is the only number whose letters run in reverse alphabetical order.
Q2.Which element has the chemical symbol W?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tungsten
The symbol comes from wolfram, the metal's other name, which is still used in several languages.
Q3.How many faces does a regular dodecahedron have?Tap to reveal
Answer: Twelve
Twelve regular pentagons, which is also why it works as a twelve-sided die.
Q4.The Terracotta Army was buried for the first emperor of which Chinese dynasty?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Qin
Qin Shi Huang unified China in 221 BC; the figures were found near Xi'an in 1974.
Q5.What is the SI unit of pressure?Tap to reveal
Answer: The pascal
One pascal is one newton per square metre, named after Blaise Pascal.
Q6.Which planet takes roughly 165 Earth years to complete one orbit of the Sun?Tap to reveal
Answer: Neptune
Discovered in 1846, it completed its first full orbit since discovery in 2011.
Q7.Which Greek city-state defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sparta
The war ran from 431 to 404 BC and ended with Athens surrendering after the destruction of its fleet.
Q8.What is pi to five decimal places?Tap to reveal
Answer: 3.14159
Five places is the usual quiz cut-off; teams who learned more will write more, and the first five must be right.
Q9.Which European congress of 1814 and 1815 redrew the continent's borders after Napoleon's defeat?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Congress of Vienna
Metternich chaired it, and the settlement shaped European diplomacy for most of the following century.
Q10.What is the medical name for the kneecap?Tap to reveal
Answer: The patella
It is a sesamoid bone, sitting within the tendon rather than joined end-to-end with other bones.
Q11.How many bits are there in a byte?Tap to reveal
Answer: Eight
Eight bits give 256 possible values, which is why a single byte covers a basic character set.
Q12.Which Russian city was called Leningrad between 1924 and 1991?Tap to reveal
Answer: Saint Petersburg
It was also Petrograd from 1914 to 1924, so a team answering Petrograd has the right city and the wrong decade.
Tiebreakers, and What to Do When a Team Disputes an Answer
A tiebreaker must have a numeric answer that nobody knows exactly, and it is settled by whichever team is nearest in either direction. That is the whole method, and it resolves a two-way tie in about fifteen seconds. Never break a tie with another knowledge question: you can tie again, and the room will let you know how it feels about that.
Hold these two back and do not use one that duplicates ground already covered in the night. Write the answer down before you ask, read the question twice, and take written answers rather than shouted ones so the nearest team is obvious to everybody.
Disputes. Decide your policy before the first question and state it once: the host's answer stands on the night, and anything genuinely wrong gets corrected before the final totals are read. That framing matters, because it gives an aggrieved team somewhere to go other than an argument in front of forty people. Two rules save most of the trouble. Accept any answer that shows the team knew the thing being asked, even if it is spelled appallingly or uses a different name for the same place. And if two teams give different answers that are both defensible — Petrograd and Saint Petersburg, say — give the point to the one that answers the question as asked, and say why out loud so the ruling looks like a rule rather than a favour.
Q1.Tiebreaker one: how many kilometres long is the Panama Canal?Tap to reveal
Answer: About 82 kilometres
Most teams guess far too high, so the nearest-answer rule separates them cleanly.
Q2.Tiebreaker two: in metres, how deep is the deepest point of Lake Baikal?Tap to reveal
Answer: About 1,642 metres
It is the deepest lake in the world, and nobody carries the figure in their head.
Shrinking It, Printing It and Running It for a Different Room
The 90-minute version. Run Rounds One, Three, Four and Six — warm-up, map, screen and decider — and drop Two and Five. You lose the two rounds that level the field, so expect the strongest team to win by more, but the shape of the night survives. Mark once, after Round Four, and keep the break to ten minutes.
The 60-minute version. Rounds One, Four and Six, ten questions each, no break, mark at the end only. That is the format that works in a lunch hour or as the first hour of a party before people stop sitting down.
For an office. Use the full six rounds but cut Round Six to eight questions and put the joker rule in the invitation email, because a declared joker gives teams something to argue about before anyone has arrived. Mixed-age offices do better on Round Five than on Round Four, so if you are choosing which round to double in value, double the food round.
For a classroom. Keep Rounds One, Two and Three, drop the mojito and the wine lees from Round Five, and put the wordplay round second as written — it is the one where a student who struggles with recall can win something. Twenty-five minutes covers those thirty-one questions if you read at pace and mark as a class.
For a family table. Play in pairs rather than teams and allow one pass per pair per round. The decider round is too hard for a mixed-age table as it stands; use it as a bonus round where every point counts double and nobody expects to score.
Printing it. Print this page, then fold or cover the answer lines as you work down each round, or read from a phone with the page zoomed to one round at a time. If you are printing answer sheets for the teams, put the round names on them in order, leave a numbered line per question and one box marked joker at the top. Nothing else is needed, and a sheet with space for team names at the top saves you collecting names separately.
If you want a different flavour of night. A full British-style night with a telly round and a sport round is laid out question by question in our pub quiz questions and answers, the shorter three-round format most venues use is in bar trivia questions, and if you want to swap a round here for a broader mixed one, pull from general knowledge trivia questions. Hosting a second night a month later? Change four rounds and keep the warm-up and the tiebreakers — regulars notice repeats in the hard round long before they notice them in the easy one.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many trivia night questions do I need?
For a two-hour night, roughly 60 to 72 questions in six rounds of ten to twelve. Below about 60 you finish early and the room drifts; above about 80 the last round is read to people who have stopped caring. The number on this page is 66, including two tiebreakers you will probably not need.
How long should a trivia night last?
Two hours door to door, of which only about 80 minutes is questions. The rest is marking, standings and one break. If you have 90 minutes, run rounds one, three, four and six and skip the rest — the night still has a warm-up, two different grounds and a decider.
What should the six rounds be?
Six grounds that reward different people: broad general knowledge, wordplay and numbers, geography, screen and song, food and everyday life, and a hard mixed decider. The test of a good line-up is whether the quiz team with one film obsessive and one geography graduate can still only win two rounds out of six.
How do you break a tie at a trivia night?
Ask one question with a numeric answer nobody knows exactly and award it to the team nearest, going over or under. Never settle a tie with another knowledge question — a second tie is possible and the room will groan. Two ready tiebreakers are in the section above.
Can I print this page and host from it?
Yes. Print it, fold the answers under as you go, or read it off a phone — every answer here is a single word, name, year or number, so nothing needs a projector, speakers or a screen. If you print team answer sheets, put the round names on them and leave a line for the joker declaration.
How do I stop teams looking up answers on their phones?
Say it once, before the first question, and make the consequence social rather than punitive: phones on the table face down, and a team caught on one forfeits that round's joker. Hosts who police phones mid-round lose more time than the cheating costs them, and the wordplay round in particular is hard to search for anyway.
