How to host a quiz night: a step-by-step guide

Hosting a quiz night is two jobs. One is the quiz: the rounds, the questions, the answer sheets and the scores. The other is the host: the person at the front who keeps it moving, settles the arguments and makes the room want to come back. Most quiz nights that go wrong get the first job right and forget the second. Here's both, step by step, from the people who run The Social Quiz Club and host quizzes for companies, venues and charities.

Step 1: pick the rounds

Five or six rounds of ten questions fill a two-hour night with a break. Four is enough for an hour.

Don't make every round a list of questions on a topic. Vary the kind of thinking, so different people carry their team at different points. A good night has:

• One or two straight trivia rounds. General knowledge, or a theme: sport, music, a decade, the occasion.
• A picture round. Faces, places, logos, film stills. Handed out on paper at the start so teams can work on it all night.
• A music round. Five seconds of an intro, name the song. It fills the room with noise, which is half its job.
• A Closest To round. The year, the distance, the number. Nobody needs to be right, only nearer than everyone else, which lets the non-experts win.
• One round you do, not know. At The Social Quiz Club that's Speed Drawing (one teammate draws, the rest guess), a blind taste test, or a sculpture round made of newspaper and tape. It's the round people talk about on the way home.

Put the easiest round first, so every team scores and settles in, and the loudest one last.

Step 2: write the questions

Ten good questions take longer to write than you think. Allow an evening for a whole quiz, and a second evening to check it.

• One answer, and only one. If a question has two defensible answers, someone will defend the other one. Rewrite it until it doesn't.
• Check every answer against a good source, not your memory. Then check the ones you were sure about.
• Spread the difficulty. In each round of ten, aim for three that everyone gets, four that most teams get, and three that only one or two teams will. If every team scores ten, the round was a waste of ten minutes.
• Date anything that changes. "Who won the 2019 men's Cricket World Cup?" stays true. "Who's the current champion?" won't by the time you reuse it.
• Make some of it impossible to Google. Picture rounds, audio, Closest To and anything about the people in the room. Our guide to making your quiz phone-proof has the full set of tricks.

Short of time? Our free question sets are written to these rules: sports, Pride and Christmas, forty or fifty questions each with the answers checked.

Step 3: teams and answer sheets

Teams of four to six. Bigger and the quiet people stop talking; smaller and you have too many sheets to mark. If people arrive as a group of ten, split them. If they arrive alone, put them together; at The Social Quiz Club we move people between teams during the night on purpose, so everyone leaves knowing more of the room.

One answer sheet per team per round. Team name at the top, numbers one to ten, a box for the score. Separate sheets per round let you mark round one while round two is being played. Print a few spares and bring more pens than you think.

Say the rules once, at the start. No phones. What counts as a right answer (surname only? spelling?). Whether half-marks exist. Then stick to them.

Step 4: run the night

A two-hour night looks something like this:

• An hour before: set up, test the screen and the speaker, check the music plays out loud and not just in your headphones. Lay out sheets and pens.
• Doors: music on. Hand out the picture round so early teams have something to do.
• Welcome, five minutes: who you are, the rules, the prizes, the timings. Keep it short.
• Rounds one to three: about twelve minutes each, collecting the sheet at the end of each round.
• The break, fifteen minutes: drinks, marking, scores on the board.
• Rounds four to six, then the picture round handed in.
• The finale: answers, final scores, the tie-break if it's needed, and the winners.

Read each question twice, clearly, then give teams time. When most of the room has stopped talking, move on.

Step 5: scoring and tie-breaks

Swap the sheets. Teams mark each other's while you read the answers. It's faster, it's fairer, and the arguing over a neighbour's handwriting is part of the entertainment. You keep the final say.

Keep a running scoreboard on paper or a screen and show it at the break and before the last round. It keeps the bottom teams trying and the top ones nervous.

Have a tie-break ready before the night. The best one is a Closest To question with a number for an answer: "In what year was the first FA Cup final played?" Each tied team writes a number; nearest wins. It's instant, it rarely ties twice, and nobody can argue with it. If two teams are the same distance away, ask a second one.

Decide disputes quickly and kindly. Listen once, rule once, move on. If you got a question wrong, say so, give everyone the point and laugh about it. A host who argues with a team loses the room.

Step 6: the host's craft

How to be a good trivia host is its own skill, and we've written about it at length in the essentials of a great quiz host: presence, pace, reading the room and the finish. A few things that post doesn't cover:

• Practise the answers out loud. The names you're going to mispronounce are the ones you've only ever read.
• Know your ruling before the question. If you'd accept "Hurst" for "Geoff Hurst", decide that when you write it, not when a team is waiting.
• Talk to the bottom of the table. The team in last place is the one most likely to leave early. A joke at their expense, a cheer for their one right answer, and they stay.
• Don't play. Not even a little. The host is the referee.
• Use a microphone for anything over about thirty people. Shouting tires your voice by round three, and the room hears that you're tired.
• Enjoy it. The room takes its mood from you.

When to hand it over

The first quiz you host is a lot of work. If it's for the office, a big birthday or a fundraiser and you'd rather enjoy the night than run it, The Get Social Quiz is our hosted version: trivia, Closest To, music, Speed Drawing and sculpture rounds, a picture round about your group, and the room mixed between rounds. The Quickfire is £650 (60 minutes, one host, up to 40 people); the Classic is £950 (2 hours, one host, up to 60 people); the Full is £1,400 (2 hours, two hosts, up to 100 people). Get Social is not VAT registered, so the price you see is the whole price; travel outside London is extra. For the office Christmas version, see how to run a work Christmas quiz.