How to run a quiz night at home without printing anything

Nobody minds writing answers. Everybody minds marking them

A home quiz always starts well. Someone has found questions, everyone has a pen, the first round is genuinely fun. It falls apart at the marking: swapping papers, arguing about spelling, one team quietly awarding itself a point, and the ten minutes of silence while the host adds up.

That dead time is what people remember, and it is the only part of a quiz that a phone genuinely fixes. The questions were never the problem.

The setup, in about two minutes

Put Trivia on the television and let everyone answer on their own phone. The question and the options go on the big screen; taps are recorded and scored instantly, so there is no paper, no marking and no arguing about whether *Sydney* was close enough.

Getting it onto a TV does not need a cable or a screen share. The host opens the presenter view and the television becomes another viewer of the same room — which matters more than it sounds, because a screen share mirrors the host's whole laptop, notifications included, and lags about a second behind everyone's phones.

Leave the room code on screen. Somebody always arrives late, and the alternative is the host reading six letters aloud over the noise.

Four rounds is the right length

The mistake most home quizzes make is being too long. Four rounds of eight questions is about fifty minutes including the arguing, and that is the point at which a room is still enjoying itself.

Vary the format rather than the topic. Straight questions get repetitive faster than people expect, so put Emoji Decode in as round two or three — a film rendered in three emoji is still a quiz question, but it plays completely differently and the room gets loud again.

Think Alike makes a good final round precisely because it is not a knowledge test. Everyone answers the same prompt and the most common answer wins, so the team that has been losing all night has an even chance, and nobody goes home having been quietly beaten for an hour.

If the group is bigger than a quiz can handle

Past about twelve people, a quiz stops being a quiz and becomes a lecture with a scoreboard. The teams get big enough that two people answer everything and everyone else watches.

That is the point to switch to Tambola, which seats fifty in one room, deals everyone a ticket and calls the numbers itself. It asks nothing of a player but attention, which is exactly right for a room where half the people did not come for a quiz.

It also works on the same television. The called numbers fill in on the big screen while everyone watches their own ticket on their phone, which is the arrangement every printed-ticket housie evening has been approximating for decades.

The things that actually go wrong

Have the questions decided before people arrive. A host picking content packs while eleven people watch is the quiz-night equivalent of choosing a film.

Do not run it from the same device that is showing the questions. If the host is playing on their phone and presenting from a laptop, nothing breaks when they go to the kitchen.

And stop one round earlier than you want to. Every quiz that went on too long went on exactly one round too long.