Quiz night in a pub

A Tuesday in a pub is four regulars and the fire. A quiz night turns that into eleven tables, and those eleven tables buy drinks for two hours instead of one. That is the entire business case, and it is why quiz nights survived everything else that happened to pubs.

The thing that kills them is not lack of interest. It is the work: writing questions on a Sunday, photocopying answer sheets, and marking forty of them at the bar between rounds while a queue forms. Most quiz nights die because the person running it got tired, not because the room stopped coming.

You run the quiz from a laptop, a tablet or your own phone, and you launch each question when you are ready rather than when a timer says so. If the bar is three deep, the next question waits. That is not a workaround, it is the single most important thing about running a quiz in a working pub.

Players scan the code on their table and they are in. No app, no account, nothing to hand out and nothing to collect at the end of a round.

The marking does not get faster. It stops existing: the leaderboard settles itself the moment a question closes, and the dead four minutes after every round go with it.

A pub quiz that works builds regulars, and regulars build a rivalry. The team that has come second three weeks running is the most valuable table in the room, and they will keep coming as long as they can see the gap.

That is what the saved history is for. You can look at who played in January and who is still playing in March, and whether the night is growing or quietly shrinking, which is the conversation you will eventually have with whoever decides whether quiz night continues.

Add your tables, print the QR codes, laminate them or slip them into table talkers. The codes do not change, so that is a job you do once rather than every week.

After that a quiz night is: pick a pack, set how many questions, press start. The five included packs will carry a weekly quiz for months before anything repeats, and most venues add a local round of their own once they have found their feet.

Pro is one host account, up to five quizzes a day and up to fifty tables, which is more than a single pub will use. A venue running one night a week will not come near any of those limits.

Set that against a midweek night that goes from four covers to eleven tables and the arithmetic is not close. The free session exists so you can check the first half of that sentence before you pay for anything.