You must make sure your trivia questions and answers for your trivia night are written clearly and correctly or the heckling won’t stop and the visits to your judge’s table will be endless. So here are some tips about how to write good trivia night questions for a great trivia night fundraiser or pub trivia.
Trivia Night Question Difficulty
Writing clear, accurate, and appropriately difficult trivia night questions for a trivia night is NOT easy. If you just jump online and make up questions in an hour, people will know. You have to have experience in playing at trivia nights or at least with trivia to be able to gauge what trivia night questions are going to be too hard or too easy.
If all of your trivia questions for trivia night are too easy, you’ll bore half of the room. If they are all too hard, people will not have any fun because no one likes to feel stupid the whole night. Either option is not good when the people paid to have fun at your trivia event! You need to challenge your customers, but not too much. And remember that you want them to come back to your trivia fundraiser next year to play and contribute their table fee again or return to your bar for another trivia night. So, if you don’t feel comfortable with writing questions (or even if you just want someone else to do it to save your HOURS), we can certainly help. You can start building a Trivia Pack HERE.
Possibility of Multiple Answers in Trivia Night Questions
You must write your questions so that only ONE answer is acceptable. For example, if you asked ,“In “Romeo and Juliet”, what is Juliet’s last name”, you would have some issues. The person WRITING the question was probably going for the answer of ‘Capulet’. However, Juliet actually has two last names in “Romeo and Juliet” because she marries Romeo towards the end giving her the new last name of ‘Montague’.
It’s a little thing that most people wouldn’t notice until they started getting multiple answers and challenges at the trivia night, but rest assured that BOTH answers would be given. Then, what would you do? Give it to both? Or only to the ones that matched your wrong answer? Tricky stuff. The easiest way to avoid having to make that decision is making sure you have clear and accurate questions with only ONE possible answer.
Trivia Question Clarity
You must tell your trivia nuts EXACTLY what you are looking for in your answer to (again) avoid constant challenges. For example: “What is the name of Jerry Seinfeld’s crazy-haired, wild neighbor on “Seinfeld”? Will you take just his first name? Will you take just his last name? Or must the tables put down the first and last name in order to get that answer correct? If you make sure the questions are as CLEAR as possible, it won’t be an issue. This question should be written: “What is the first and last name of Jerry Seinfeld’s crazy-haired, wild neighbor on Seinfeld?” in order to avoid confusion.
Again, having the right trivia night questions and answers can make or break your trivia night. Even if the venue stinks and you run out of beverages, if you have GOOD trivia, your patrons will leave happy and ready to return next week or next year to play trivia again. IF you want to save the hours it will take to create and refine your trivia night questions OR if are a little nervous about writing trivia on your own, you can start to buy your trivia night questions for your whole trivia night in only about 10 minutes. Shhh... we won't tell anyone. :)