How to host a quiz night at home

Decide the shape before you write a single question

A quiz that runs long is a quiz people remember as too long, however good the questions were. So fix the shape first and write to fit it. Six rounds of eight questions is about ninety minutes with a break in the middle, which is the right length for an evening at home. Four rounds of eight is an hour and is the safer choice if you have never done this before.

Then decide whether people are playing in teams or on their own. Teams are better in almost every case: a team of three has a conversation about every question, which is where the entertainment is, and a person who knows nothing about football is not sitting silently through a football round. Teams of three or four, and let people pick their own, except for the one round where you make everybody swap.

The six rounds that always work

You do not need to be clever about the structure. This set has been working in pubs for forty years for a reason, and the variety is what keeps a mixed room in it.

A general knowledge opener. Easy on purpose, so that everybody scores and nobody feels out of their depth in the first ten minutes.
A picture round. Photographs, logos, close ups of ordinary objects. It gives people something to do with their hands and it works while latecomers are still arriving.
A music round. Intros, lyrics or a humming round if you are feeling brave. It is the round that gets the loudest and it is the one people talk about afterwards.
A themed round on something local or personal. The street the party is on, the year everybody left school, the house you are sitting in. This is the round that turns a generic quiz into your quiz.
A wipeout or a wager round. Points at risk, all or nothing. It keeps the teams at the bottom of the table interested when the gap has opened up.
A fast finish. Short questions, quick answers, no conferring. It ends the evening on movement rather than on a long think.

Writing questions people enjoy getting wrong

The instinct of a first time quizmaster is to write hard questions. Resist it. A question nobody in the room can answer produces silence, and silence is the enemy of a quiz. The best question is one where two or three teams get there, everybody else says "of course" when they hear the answer, and somebody at the back is annoyed with themselves for a full minute.

Aim for a spread. Two questions per round that almost everybody will get, four that a decent team will get, and two that will separate the top of the table from the middle. Check every answer twice against a source that is not the first thing a search engine showed you, because the one thing that genuinely damages a home quiz is an answer that turns out to be wrong after somebody has argued about it.

Keep them short. A question that takes forty seconds to read is a question people have stopped listening to by the end. If it needs a preamble, cut the preamble.

Scoring without an argument

Paper answer sheets and swapping them between teams is the traditional method and it has two problems: somebody always marks generously for their friends, and the scores take five minutes to collate between rounds, which is five minutes of dead air multiplied by six.

Doing it on phones removes both. Everybody answers on their own screen, the marking is automatic, and the scoreboard is ready the moment the round ends. The other advantage is subtler: nobody can hear what anybody else has answered, which quietly stops the copying that happens in every room where the answers are said out loud.

If you want the closest thing to a pub quiz, put the questions on the telly and let the phones be the answer sheets. The room reads the question together, which is what makes a quiz feel communal rather than like fifteen people doing homework.

Quiz RushQuestions on the big screen, answers on every phone, scores as you go.
Type AnswerNothing multiple choice: type it in, with near misses forgiven.

Running the room on the night

The quizmaster has one job that matters more than any other, which is keeping the clock moving. Everything else is detail.

Read every question twice, at a slower pace than feels natural, then give the time and stick to it.
Do not answer questions about the question. "Do you mean the first one or the second one" is a trap, and the honest answer is always that the question says what it says.
Take the break after the third round, not after the fourth. People are still enthusiastic at the halfway point and much less so at three quarters.
Give out the answers at the end of each round rather than saving them all up. The rhythm of question, answer, scoreboard is what makes an evening feel like it is going somewhere.
Have a tie break ready. One question with a number for an answer, closest wins. You will need it about one time in four.

Numbers, prizes and the size of the room

A home quiz works with six people and it works with thirty six. The thing that changes is how you handle the answers: at six you could still do it on paper, and at thirty six you cannot without spending the evening marking. If the room is bigger than a table, do it on phones.

Prizes should be small and slightly silly. A tin of biscuits is a better prize than money, because money makes people take it seriously and taking a home quiz seriously is how the arguing starts. A prize for last place is worth having too, and it should be better than the prize for first.

What it costs to run one

Nothing, if the room is eight people or fewer. In Koven every quiz format is free on the free tier, guests join with a four letter code and never install anything, and you can write your own questions without paying. A bigger room, or putting the quiz on the telly with the phones as answer sheets, is what a subscription covers, and only the person hosting needs one. Everybody else just turns up.

What Koven costsRoom sizes, the party screen, and why one person paying covers the room.
All fifteen gamesThe two quiz formats, and thirteen other things to play afterwards.