Organizing a pub quiz in your café: the complete playbook

For a café, a pub quiz is one of the few activities that both fills a quiet evening and creates regular guests. Whoever takes part comes with a group, stays for two hours, and drinks more during those two hours than during a normal visit.

The problem isn't the idea but the execution. Coming up with questions takes time, counting points takes time, and one evening where the count doesn't add up costs you half your participants.

What you need

• A fixed evening. Every week or every other week, always the same day. Irregularity is deadly for attendance.
• Forty to sixty questions, divided into four or five rounds each with its own theme.
• Someone to host the evening and link the rounds together.
• A way to keep score that no one doubts.
• A prize that's worthwhile without being expensive.

The setup of an evening that works

Length

An hour and a half to two hours, including breaks. Shorter feels like too little for the effort of coming; longer and the last round plays out in front of a half-empty room.

Rounds

Four or five rounds of ten questions. Vary the difficulty and make sure each round has its own character: general knowledge, music, images, something local, and a round that has nothing to do with knowledge, such as estimating or guessing.

The local round

This is the round that sets your evening apart from every other pub quiz. Questions about the street, the municipality, the history of the building. Regular guests feel at home and new guests learn something.

The local round is almost always the round people laugh hardest at, and the reason people come back.

Counting points: where it goes wrong

Having guests hand in answers on paper and checking them yourself costs ten minutes between rounds, and during those ten minutes the energy in the room drops. On top of that, discussion arises the moment one answer has been marked incorrectly.

The variant that solves this: guests take part via their own phone and the scores tally themselves. At TablePlay, each table scans the QR code, chooses a table name, and the standings appear live. No paper, no checking, no discussion. Check the games to see which quiz variants exist, or the page for cafés to see how that works out in a café.

The questions themselves

Whoever writes a quiz for the first time almost always makes the same two mistakes: too difficult, and too much factual knowledge. A quiz in which a team gets two out of ten questions right isn't a challenge but a humiliation.

The distribution that works

• Two questions that almost everyone gets right. Those are there to give the feeling that you're taking part.
• Six questions you have to think about or can discuss. This is where the fun is.
• Two questions almost no one knows. Those determine who wins.

The discussion in the middle is where a pub quiz gets its value from. A question that one person knows and the rest don't produces no conversation. A question that four people can figure out together does.

Formats that do better than factual knowledge

Estimation questions (how high, how heavy, how many), image questions, music clips, and questions where you have to determine an order. They have one thing in common: you can take part without knowing the answer. That keeps teams in the game who would otherwise drop out after round two.

Prizes that work

The prize doesn't have to be big; it has to be visible. A round of drinks for the winning table, a voucher for next time, or something on the house. A voucher has one advantage over cash: it brings the team back.

Hosting the evening

Kvizmaster ne mora biti smiješan, ali mora biti jasan. Ono što veče čini glatkim je gotovo u potpunosti ritam:

• Pročitaj svako pitanje dva puta, sa pauzom između. Čitanje samo jednom garantovano izaziva ruku koja pita da li možeš ponoviti.
• Daj isto vrijeme za razmišljanje po pitanju, i unaprijed reci koliko dugo to traje.
• Objavi rezultate nakon svake runde. To je trenutak kad se sala na kratko probudi.
• Neka pauza bude kratka. Deset minuta je dovoljno; petnaest i izgubio si polovinu pažnje.

Posljednja runda

Neka bodovanje posljednje runde nosi malo veću težinu, ili sačuvaj jednu rundu u kojoj timovi mogu ulagati bodove. Bez toga, tim koji nakon treće runde zaostaje deset bodova mentalno odustaje, a to se osjeti za šankom.

Kako popuniti prve večeri

1. Najavi ga tri sedmice unaprijed, ne tri dana.
2. Lično pitaj svoje stalne goste da povedu tim. To djeluje bolje od bilo kojeg postera.
3. Postavi datum na svoj Google profil i na društvene mreže, sa fotografijom lokala, a ne logom kviza.
4. Napravi prvu večer lakšom nego što bi želio. Ko osjeti da nema šanse, neće se vratiti.

Šta to košta i donosi

Računaj na dva do četiri sata pripreme po večeri ako sam pišeš pitanja, plus samu večer. Zauzvrat, kviz veče u većini kafića postaje najposjećenija radna večer, sa većom potrošnjom po gostu od prosjeka jer ljudi duže ostaju.

Ako želiš da se riješiš pripreme, pogledaj koliko košta stalni kviz na stolu na cijenama.