Pub quiz prize ideas

Not to reward the winners. To give everyone else a reason to have tried, and a reason to come back next week.

That reframing decides most of the choices below. A prize that is large, rare and won by the same team every week is worse than a small one that moves around, even though the first costs more.

The second thing a prize does is signal that the night is real. "Great prizes" on a poster means nothing; "£40 bar tab" means somebody has thought about this.

A bar tab is the standard first prize in most pubs for a reason that is not laziness: it costs you the wholesale price rather than the retail price, and it is spent in your building, usually that night, usually with people who buy more on top of it.

Thirty to fifty pounds for a winning team is the normal range and it is generous enough to be worth playing for. Split across four people it is a good night rather than a windfall, which is the right size.

The one thing to watch is a team that wins every week and effectively drinks free. That is a signal to change the questions, not the prize.

The shape of the prize matters more than its value. These cost about the same and work considerably better.

It sounds like the obvious way to fill a room and it reliably changes the room in ways you did not want.

Large cash attracts teams who are there to win rather than to have an evening out: bigger teams, more phones under the table, more disputes over rulings. The social atmosphere that makes a quiz night worth having is the first casualty.

It also sets an expectation you have to keep meeting. A night that drew a crowd with a two-hundred-pound prize has a problem when the prize goes back to forty.

If you want a big prize, make it a rollover or a season-end. Same headline number, spread across weeks, and it builds the habit instead of buying a crowd once.

A bottle of something from behind the bar. A meal for two on a quiet night, which costs you food margin and brings people back on a second night. A free entry for next week, which is literally free and still works.

Something from a local business in exchange for a mention: the barber, the chip shop, the garden centre. Most will say yes, it costs you nothing, and it makes the night feel like part of the town.

Novelty trophies that get handed back the following week. Cheap, and the ritual of handing it over is worth more than the object.

On the poster, in the post, and at the start of the night. People decide whether to come based on what is on offer, and a prize revealed at the end has done none of the work it exists to do.

Say the actual thing. "£40 bar tab, plus a bottle for second" is a reason to come. "Prizes to be won" is not.