Top 10 Ways to Ensure You Knock Your Virtual Trivia Night Out of the Park
A Zoom trivia competition is a great way to stay connected to important people in your life – friends, family, coworkers – when you can't be physically present. Done right, the event can be a highlight of quarantine, or the perfect way to spend a Thursday. Done wrong, it can be a downright disaster, leaving guests wondering, "What was the host thinking?"
After hosting thousands of Zoom trivia nights as team-building activities and friend and family gatherings, we've developed ten time-tested techniques to ensure that your trivia party is the talk of the town... or the virtual office water cooler.
Top 10 ways to ensure the best virtual Zoom trivia ever:
Break the group into teams to maximize fun
Give the group time to catch up in meaningful ways
Ensure the trivia is creative
Make sure your questions include a mix of everything…
…But also work to make the themes coherent
Customize trivia to the group
Remember that variety is the spice of life
Get a great host to lead the games
Have a system in place for smooth operations
Don’t forget a tiebreaker
Let’s dive into it!
1. Break the group into teams to maximize fun
For the most fun, we recommend splitting participants into teams using breakout rooms so that people can talk to each other in smaller groups, rather than try to get a word in edgewise on a 20-plus person Zoom meeting.
Breakout rooms are a great way to allow Zoom trivia game participants to spend a good portion of the event engaged in meaningful conversation and debate, while also having time to see the larger group. Our experience has shown us comprehensively that collaborative play in smaller groups causes teams to come together better than individual play in a bigger group.
You can have pre-assigned teams if you want to get competitive juices going between different parts of a family or organization. Or, try randomized teams if you're hosting an icebreaker event or a game for a group where everyone is familiar with one another.
2. Give the group time to catch up in meaningful ways
Remember that while the group is getting together under the guise of trivia, everyone is showing up because they want to experience some form of connection in these isolating times. For the best experience possible, make sure you design a game that focuses not just on trivia but on community-building.
If you're using breakout rooms, make sure participants have at least five minutes in a breakout room during each round, so they can work together to answer the trivia round in addition to catching up with each other.
Otherwise, you risk the event feeling rushed and chaotic, and players won't feel that they've gotten what they wanted out of the event.
3. Ensure the trivia is creative
When it comes to a high-quality virtual trivia night, the special sauce is "content, content, content." We recently heard of a trivia night where one of the trivia questions was "What was Humphrey Bogart's original first name?" and the answer was ... Humphrey! Half the group left the event on the spot.
While Trivial Pursuit is fun, if every question of every round is that type of question, the game might get dull quickly. When we write a round of live trivia, we like to ensure that questions are inspired, oftentimes involving wordplay or creative thinking. And we like to mix things up a bit.
A favorite round of ours is Homophone Bonanza, where we ask teams to name the correct homophone phrase. (For those of you wondering at home, homophones are words that sound alike but are spelled differently.) You'd be surprised how excited teams get when they uncover answers like FLOUR FLOWER and COWARD COWERED.
4. Make sure your questions include a mix of everything…
I once auditioned for Jeopardy! But the thrilling experience became decidedly less so when I had to play a simulation of the game and was given categories including Amazonian Birds and 16th-Century Inventions.
There are few feelings worse than being saddled with an arcane trivia topic about which you know absolutely nothing – you're useless for the round! Some of your friends might be experts in one thing and know nothing about another. If the whole game is about the latter, your friends may opt to check out early.
To ensure that no one has that feeling on your trivia night, take care to include a mix of questions from pop culture, sports, history, literature, general knowledge, and current events. Did someone say MUSIC ROUND? That will ensure that everyone has something to contribute and leaves feeling like a champion.
5. …But also work to make the themes coherent
One of the trickiest things to do is create topics that incorporate trivia from all walks of life but still retain a coherent theme. We've found that a lot of our best categories are the ones where we thought outside the box to create a cohesive category that appeals to everyone.
For example, try your hand at our Feeling Fruity category that touches on questions about the company Apple, the novel The Grapes of Wrath, and the TV show The Real Housewives of Orange County.
Wordplay is also a great way to incorporate questions from many different fields. A favorite of ours is 2 Bs or Not 2 Bs, a round where all answers have to have – you guessed it – two consecutive Bs. (Plus it's a great excuse to put Bobby Kennedy and Roger Rabbit in a round together.)
6. Customize trivia to the group
Another great way to throw an above-average trivia night is to customize the questions to the group. Send out a short survey before the event to gather high-level preferences so you can ensure that you're writing questions that attendees will really get into.
You can also crowdsource ideas for themes and write questions about the category that appeals most to you. You never know where the crowd will lead you – a now-classic round of ours based on famous fish, entitled Something's Fishy, arose from one group's desire to have questions inspired by their company mascot: a red snapper!
Lastly, if you're organizing a Zoom trivia event for a special someone (surprise birthday party, anyone?), you can have participants customize a round about the guest of honor so the event can feel extra special.
7. Remember that variety is the spice of life
Trivia is inherently a blast, but one easy way to make it even more fun is to include a variety of mediums for the different rounds. Besides having cleverly written questions, consider mixing things up with a picture round, where you ask participants to identify a series of related photos (celebrities, wonders of the world, corporate logos ... the possibilities are endless!).
Or add in a fan favorite, the music round, where you play clips of ten songs related by a common theme but spanning different genres (One Word Song titles, anyone?), and then ask teams to identify the song title and artist singing each song.
For an extra twist, have guests guess the theme after identifying all ten songs for additional points!
8. Get a great host to lead the games
Nothing brings up the mood on an online trivia game on Zoom like a high-energy host who knows how to set the mood, when to pump up the crowd, and when to step back so the group can converse. There are tons of great hosts out there to lead your event. Look for a host…
With a magnetic personality
Who has improvisation skills
Who is passionate about trivia
Who is dedicated to inclusivity
Maybe the passion for hosting lies within. If so, that's great; take the reins and rock on! But if leading large group events isn't your forte, there's no need to worry. There are plenty of talented musicians and entertainers whose careers have been impacted by the pandemic who are perfect for the occasion.
Just make sure to provide them with clear instructions and pay them well for their services – hosting's not easy, and they make it look seamless!
9. Have a system in place for smooth operations
So you've got your varied, creative content and your excellent host in place. You're almost good to go. The last thing you need to ensure the event is smooth sailing is a system in place to collect team answers and score them.
Whether it's via email, Zoom chat, Google form, or whatever system floats your boat, make sure you have a plan for how teams will submit their answers and how you'll grade their answers efficiently. You might also think through how to handle any disputes that arise–the trivia version of the Scrabble dictionary.
If you have more than six or seven teams, consider enlisting another person to help score while your host continues leading the event so that players don't have to wait for ten minutes each round to find out how their team is faring in the standings.
10. Don’t forget a tiebreaker
I can count the most embarrassing moments of my life on one hand: When my pants fell down in Mrs. Foxson's first-grade class, when I accidentally sent a YouTube link to a Britney Spears video to my Managing Director at a former employer, and when I hosted one of my first trivia nights and didn't have a question to break the tie we had at the end of the game.
I couldn't think on the fly, and we left the game with both teams tied, thus going home as co-winners. No one was too pleased. While ties can be fine, that winning spirit and killer instinct is part of the fun of a perfect trivia night. If we skip the “winning,” it can spoil the fun!
So let my embarrassment be your lesson: Come equipped with a tiebreaker to ensure that you're able to crown a trivia champion at your trivia night!
Now go off and host the best virtual trivia game night ever!
And with that, we've condensed months of trivia learnings into the top ten ways to throw a great virtual trivia night or virtual team trivia event. So, go forth and crush it!
Or, if it sounds like too much work, reach out to Bar None Games and we'll take the hassle off your hands by throwing a great Zoom trivia event for you and your team. We have hosted hundreds of games, from small groups of friends to major corporations. We have a cadre of incredible hosts, and we’ve refined our methods to create the perfect game to play on Zoom.
We are particularly passionate about inclusion, and have games to fit a variety of themes, holidays, and diversity celebrations. We would love to help you host your next big event.
We can promise that our games will have you and your team asking "when's the rematch?!" before the first game is even over.