Players join by scanning the code on their table

They point their phone camera at the card on the table. The camera offers a link, they tap it, a web page opens, they type a team name, and they are in the quiz. That is the entire process, and on a phone that has been out of the pocket already it takes about eight seconds.

Nothing is installed. No account is created, no email address is asked for, no password is set and nothing has to be confirmed from an inbox. The only thing a player types is the name they want on the leaderboard.

Because every step between the card on the table and the first question is a team that decides not to bother. A download is a minute of waiting, an app store password nobody remembers, and four hundred megabytes on a phone that is already full. A sign-up is an email, a confirmation, and the reasonable question of why a pub quiz needs your address.

A group of four who came out for a drink will do one of those things and not two. So the product does neither: the quiz is a web page, and the web page is already on their phone by the time they have read the table number.

There is a second benefit that matters more than it used to. We hold nothing about your players, no accounts, no email addresses and no marketing list, because we never ask for any of it. The name they type is attached to the session and that is all there is.

Each table in your venue gets its own code, and that code does not change. You print the set when you set the venue up, stand them on the tables, and they work for every quiz you run from then on: this week's, next week's, and the one in March.

That is why they are worth printing properly. A code that is laminated or slipped into a table talker survives a spilled pint; a code printed fresh every week is a job you have given yourself for no reason.

Pub WiFi was assumed to be unreliable when this was built, because it is. A phone that loses its connection retries on a backoff rather than giving up, and when it gets back the server sends it the current state of the game, meaning the question that is live now and the scores as they stand, instead of making the player rejoin from the start.

If the connection is bad enough that the socket will not come back at all, the phone falls back to asking the server for the state on a timer. It is less immediate, and the player keeps playing.

In practice the thing that saves a table is team mode: everyone at a table shares one score, so one working phone is enough and the other three can watch it.

The player view is a web page, so an iPhone, an Android and a tablet all work, and nobody at a table needs the same device as anybody else. A regular carrying a phone from four years ago is not a problem to solve.

A team that walks in halfway through the first round scans their table's code and joins the question that is live. They have missed the points from the questions already closed, which is exactly what would have happened on paper.