Score by table, or rank every player

Everyone sitting at a table shares one score, and the leaderboard ranks tables. This is what almost every venue wants, because it is what a pub quiz has always been: four people arguing quietly over one answer.

It has a practical benefit too. Because the table shares a score, only one phone at the table has to work. Nobody is excluded for having a flat battery, and in a room where half the crowd is not going to scan anything, the quiz still runs.

Every player is ranked on their own. It suits a standing crowd with no tables to sit at, a room where people have come alone, and an office or remote event where nobody can lean over and confer anyway.

It changes the feel of the night. Team mode is sociable and slow; individual mode is quicker, more competitive, and less forgiving of the person who is there for the drink rather than the quiz.

The mode is chosen per session, so a quiet Tuesday and a full Friday can be run differently without changing anything about your setup.

A correct answer is worth the question's full points, whenever in the window it arrives. A wrong answer is worth nothing. That is the whole model.

Use it when you want the quiz to reward knowing the answer and nothing else: a charity night, a mixed-ability crowd, or a room where half the tables have one phone between four and are always going to be slower.

The same correct answer is worth less the longer it takes. The value decays across the answer window on a curve that falls steeply at the start and flattens at the end, so being fast is genuinely worth something and being a second late to tap is not a disaster.

For a hundred-point question on a fifteen-second window, that works out as follows.

The floor is the important part of the design. A correct answer at the buzzer is still worth a fifth of the question, so a slow correct answer always beats a fast wrong one, which is the property that stops the mode turning the quiz into a reaction test.

Questions are not all worth the same. Each one carries its own value, from 10 up to 1,000, with 100 as the default, so a tie-breaker at 500 really is worth five times a warm-up at 100, in both scoring modes.

That is the lever to reach for when a round feels flat. A single high-value question at the end of a round changes what the standings mean without changing anything else about the night.