Trivia is a question-and-answer game, usually played in teams over several rounds, with a point for each right answer and a spare question held back in case two teams finish level. This page is one night of it in three rounds: numbers, words, and the tiebreaker.

How do you play trivia?

One person reads the questions out, everybody writes answers on a sheet, and the sheets get marked at the end of each round. Hold every answer until the whole table has committed, keep a running total, and settle a draw with a closest-guess question rather than a coin.

What is a good tiebreaker question for trivia?

A number nobody in the room knows, where the closest guess wins: beans in the jar, bricks in the building, steps to the top. It can never end in a draw the way a knowledge question can, and it rewards the team that estimates out loud instead of the team that shouts.

How many questions should a trivia round have?

Ten is the size most tables can play without losing the thread, which is why a standard answer sheet has ten lines. The shape of the night matters more than the length: a short round of numbers, a round with a theme running through it, and a closest-guess question held back for a tie. That is the night on this page, cut down to ten questions in total so you can play it in one sitting.

← BlogOct 27, 20262 min read

Trivia in three rounds, tiebreaker and all

Q: Can you win trivia by guessing?

You can guess your way to about half of a true-or-false round, since ten coin flips land on five. What guessing cannot reach is a clean sheet: every question doubles the pile of possible sheets, so the perfect one is a single sheet out of 1,024. Quiz nights are won on the questions one table works out and the other table flips for.

I'm Heron. I have hosted exactly one quiz night, and I lost control of it in round two, when I read the answers out in the wrong order and awarded a point to a team that had written nothing.

That answer sheet was question 1. Nine more below in three rounds, and nobody is marking them, so let's keep each other honest.

Why nobody guesses a round and wins it

Ten true-or-false questions feel guessable. Coin-flip them all and you land on five, which is a respectable way to lose every round of your life.

The clean sweep is what we are after, and guessing cannot reach it. Every question doubles the pile of possible sheets, so the perfect one is a single sheet out of 1,024.

Let's shrink the round to seven questions and count the pile again.

2⁷ =

Same rules as above. You've got this.

Round one: the numbers round

Four questions, and every answer is something you can work out at the table. No dates, no capital cities, nothing you were supposed to have read.

We pick up at question 2. Keep an honest tally: the scoreboard at the end asks for it, and so does the person you send this to.

Hosting a party?

Riddle 2 of 10

The quiz is called for 3:30 sharp. What angle sits between the two hands of the clock at 3:30?

Riddle 3 of 10

Four of you take seats 1 to 4 at the quiz table. How many different seating orders are there?

Riddle 4 of 10

How many pips are there on a pair of standard six-sided dice?

Riddle 5 of 10

The quizmaster says the answer is a three-digit number, all digits the same, adding to 12. What is it?

Question 3 is the one that pays off away from the quiz. Four chairs make 24 orders because each seat narrows the next, which is the same chain the answer sheet ran ten times over.

Round two is where I lost my own quiz night. One theme runs through all four answers, and not one question prints a digit.

We're calling a theme like that a gift. Catch it on question 6 and you can hunt the other three down instead of sitting there waiting to remember them.

Round two: the words round

Four questions, one theme, and not a digit in sight. Let's catch the theme on question 6 and spend it on the three that follow.

Our fifteen questions where the answer is printed inside the question run on the same habit, and so do the thirty puzzles we keep for a longer evening.

Riddle 6 of 10

Spelled out in English, which number has exactly as many letters as its own value?

Riddle 7 of 10

Spelled out in English, which number has all of its letters in alphabetical order?

Riddle 8 of 10

Count upward in US English: one, two, three, and on. Which is the first number to use the letter A?

Riddle 9 of 10

O, T, T, F, F, S, S. The quizmaster wants the next letter in that row. What is it?

The theme was spelling. Four, forty, one thousand, and E for eight: the whole round turns on how numbers look in letters.

Round three: the tiebreaker, closest guess wins

A quiz night that ends level gets settled by a number nobody in the room knows. Bricks in the building, steps to the top of the tower, and the jar of beans we are taking here.

Most tables shout. We're calling that The Shouted Number: a figure with nothing underneath it, and it loses to two lines of arithmetic every time.

Riddle 10 of 10

The night ends level. The jar is 6 inches across and 8 inches tall, packed with jellybeans. How many?

Our estimate wins without being right. Closest takes the prize, so a worked number in the right thousand beats a confident number in the wrong one.

One famous crowd managed it without any arithmetic at all. Galton reported that the middlemost of 787 guesses at an ox's dressed weight came in 9 pounds high, 0.8 percent off, and a later reading of his own papers puts the real miss a little wider.

A table of four falls a long way short of 787 people, so we do the arithmetic instead: a volume, a fraction for the air, and the size of one bean. That is the slow, checkable kind of mental arithmetic, and it is the only part of a quiz night you can practice.

What to remember

Every question is a fork. Ten two-way questions make 1,024 sheets, so guessing lands you on five of them and never on all ten.
Hunt the theme. A themed round hands you half of every answer before you remember a thing, so find it early and spend it.
Say your assumptions out loud. A jar estimate with its numbers showing beats The Shouted Number, and the table can argue with it.

Honest tally: how many of the ten did you get?

FAQ

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