What you need to run a quiz night

The kit list: what you actually need, what you can skip, what a screen adds, and an honest comparison of phones against pens and paper.

Last reviewed 14 September 2026

What you genuinely need

Less than most lists suggest. A quiz night needs questions, a way for people to answer them, and a way to work out who won. Everything else is improvement rather than requirement.

The irreducible version: a set of questions you have read through, something to answer on, and somebody at the front who can be heard.

Questions: Either written or bought. The one thing there is no way around, and the one that costs the most time if you do it from scratch every week.
A way to be heard: In a small room, your voice. In a large or loud one, a microphone, and this is the single piece of kit most often missing when a quiz night struggles.
A way to answer: Paper and pens, or phones. The comparison is below.
A way to score: A spreadsheet, a sheet of paper, or software that does it as the answers come in.

What a screen adds

It is not required and it is the best upgrade available. Most venues already have one.

What it buys you: picture rounds become possible, questions can be read as well as heard, which fixes half of all disputes in a noisy room, and the leaderboard becomes a shared moment rather than an announcement.

The check that matters is not whether the question is legible from the bar but whether the leaderboard is, because that is the thing people look at from across the room.

A television with a browser, or a laptop and an HDMI cable, is enough. A projector is better in a big room and worse in a bright one.

Sound, and why it is worth more than a screen

A quiz where the back half of the room cannot hear the questions is a quiz where the back half of the room stops playing. It is the most common fixable failure in a pub quiz and the cheapest to fix.

A basic PA or even a small portable speaker with a microphone transforms a large room. It also saves your voice, which matters by week twelve.

If you are planning a music round, test the audio in the actual room with people in it. Music sounds different in an empty pub, and a music round that cannot be heard is fifteen minutes of nothing.

Paper and pens against phones

Both work. They fail in different ways and it is worth knowing which failures you would rather have.

Paper: what it is good at: No technology to fail, no connection to lose, works for everybody regardless of what they are carrying, and free. In a room with an older crowd and bad signal it is genuinely the right answer.
Paper: what it costs: Somebody marks forty sheets between rounds while a queue forms at the bar. That is the whole cost and it is a large one: it is the dead four minutes after every round, the arithmetic errors, the disputed totals, and the reason most people running a quiz eventually stop.
Phones: what they are good at: The marking stops existing. Scores settle as each question closes, there is nothing to hand out or collect, and the standings are correct by construction rather than by addition.
Phones: what they cost: A dependency on the room's connection, and a crowd who have to be willing to use them. The first is manageable, since a decent system reconnects and keeps going, and the second is the real question, because it depends entirely on who drinks in your pub.

The bits people forget

A printed copy of the running order and the answers, in your pocket, for when the screen or the connection lets you down. It has saved more quiz nights than any other item on this page.

Spare pens, if you are using paper. Always more than you think.

Something to stand the table cards or answer sheets on so they survive a wet table.

A way to see the time that is not the thing you are running the quiz on.

And somewhere to put the prize where the room can see it all night.

The no-marking version

Players answer on their own phones and the scores settle themselves. The first session is free, so you can compare it against paper on a real night.

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