A quiz night in a taproom is not a quiz night in a hotel. How PubTrivia is used in pubs, bars, restaurants, breweries, student unions and charity nights.
Midweek trade and the same teams every week
The classic case, and the one the product was built for. A quiz fills a Tuesday that would otherwise be four people and the fire. You host from behind the bar, the regulars come as the same team every week and want to see last week's standings, and nobody wants to be marking answer sheets while there is a queue. Session history is what turns a one-off into a fixture: the same teams, week on week, watching their own form.
A louder room and a standing crowd
A quiz in a bar competes with the room. Shorter rounds and time-weighted scoring keep it moving, and because every player has the question on their own phone, a team standing at the back does not need to hear you read it out over the noise. Tables matter less here, individual mode works better for a crowd that has not sat down.
A quiz that has to run around service
The quiz cannot dictate the kitchen. Manual pacing is the whole answer: you hold the next question while mains go out and pick it up when the floor is clear, and the round does not care that it took eleven minutes instead of six. Covers rather than teams is usually the right shape, with one code per table and however many people are sitting at it.
No PA, no kitchen, often no staff to spare
A taproom rarely has a microphone, and often has one person working. The question being on every phone means you are not shouting it across a room with concrete walls, and once a session is running it needs a tap to move on rather than somebody standing at a screen. Beer and Food & Drink rounds land well with a taproom crowd for the obvious reason.
Sharing screens with live sport
The screens are already spoken for. Because the questions are on the phones, the quiz can run on one screen while the football stays on the others, or on no screen at all if the fixture matters more that night. Quizzes also fit the gaps: a round at half time, a round after full time, and a Sports pack that the room will argue about.
A new crowd every single week
Guest entertainment on a rota, with an audience that changes completely between one Wednesday and the next and a mix of ages at every table. Packs can be reused without anyone noticing, which is the opposite of a pub's problem, and staff who host it one week and not the next need it to be obvious with no training. Team mode by room number works well.
Large teams, high turnout, staff who rotate
Big nights with teams of eight and a hundred people in the room. Tables scale to the venue rather than to a licence, with Pro covering up to fifty tables and Ultimate unlimited, and the union staff running it are rarely the same two people twice, so the host view needs to be self-explanatory. Pop culture and music rounds do the heavy lifting.
An older crowd sharing phones at a table
Members' clubs, sports clubs and legions, where not everyone at a table will be scanning anything. Team mode handles it: one phone per table is enough, because the table shares a score and whoever is holding the phone is answering for all of them. No accounts and no downloads matters more here than anywhere else.
A one-off night that has to raise money
A quiz run once, for a cause, usually by somebody who has never run one. There is no weekly rhythm to build, so everything has to work first time: printed table codes, a pack you have read through, and a leaderboard on the screen that keeps the room in the room between the raffle and the last orders. The free session covers a whole night for up to ten tables.
Several venues, your own questions, and a landlord to report to
If you are paid to host, the quiz is your product. Your own packs travel with you between venues, each venue keeps its own tables and codes, and the session history is what you show a landlord who wants to know whether last month was worth what he paid you. Ultimate's five accounts cover a small circuit run by more than one host.
No venue at all, and people in three time zones
An office quiz, a team social, or a remote team on a video call. There is no room and no table cards, since you share the join link instead of printing it, and individual mode tends to beat teams when nobody can lean over and confer. The things that make it work in a pub, meaning no installs and no accounts, are the same things that stop it being a twenty-minute IT problem at the start of a call.
Whichever of these you are, the same things are true underneath: every feature is on every plan except the limits, and what it costs depends only on how many quizzes you run and how many people host them.
One free session, up to ten tables, no card. Set your tables up and run a real quiz before you decide.
Start free, no card needed
PubTrivia