The leaderboard moves the moment a question closes

A question closes. The answers are scored, the standings are recomputed, and the new order is pushed to the host view and to every phone in the room at the same moment. There is no round boundary to wait for and nothing to total up.

That means a table can see, between question four and question five, that they have gone from third to second. It is a small thing that changes the temperature of a room.

On paper, a quiz has a dead patch after every round. Sheets are collected, somebody marks them at the bar, and the room talks amongst itself for four minutes with nothing to look at. Do that six times and you have lost twenty-four minutes of a two-hour night, and the energy that went with it.

There is also the part nobody admits: marking is where quizzes go wrong. A sheet gets missed, a total gets added twice, and the argument at the end is about arithmetic rather than about the answer to question fourteen.

A leaderboard that settles itself removes both. The marking is not faster, it has stopped existing.

In team mode the board ranks tables, so it reads the way a pub quiz scoreboard has always read: the names teams gave themselves, in order, with the gap visible. In individual mode it ranks players.

The same standings are on the host screen, which is what you put on the TV, and on every phone. A table at the back does not need to be able to read the projector to know where they are.

The reason to show the gap rather than just the order is that second place is where a quiz night makes its money. A table eight points behind with two rounds left will stay, and will buy another round while they do. A table that has no idea where it stands will drift off at half nine.

This is also why the scoring mode is worth thinking about: time-weighted scoring keeps the gaps moving, which keeps the board worth looking at.