Quiz Night

001

What is the game?

A quiz night is the most flexible table game there is: one host asks the questions, everyone else writes the answers. It works with a crowd, needs almost no preparation and can be rebuilt around whatever the group cares about — music, film, history, geography, sport, general knowledge.

What separates a good quiz from a plain question-and-answer session is the round structure. Split the questions into categories and treat each category as its own round: the standings keep moving, and a contestant who fell behind still has a way back.

002

Setting up

• Pick a host. The host does not compete; they read the questions, collect the answers and enter the points into PointSim.
• Choose five categories. Each category is a round. Five rounds of five questions makes a balanced session of about 45 minutes.
• Write the questions in advance. Five per round plus one spare. The spare keeps the round balanced if you have to throw out a disputed question.
• Hand out answer sheets. Everyone writes their answer; at the end of a round the sheets pass to the player on the right and get cross-marked while the host reads out the answers.

003

Scoring

The base rule is simple: one point per correct answer, five per round at most. The additions below give each round its own character.

• Negative points exist only on the risk question; drop that row if your group does not want them — nothing else breaks.
• Do not award half points for partly correct answers. Whole numbers keep the board far easier to read.
• Settle any dispute before the round closes. Once a round is in PointSim, correcting it means undoing the round.

004

Setting it up in PointSim

Every contestant ends each round with a single total (somewhere between 0 and 5-6), so free number entry is the right method. With a crowd, think in teams: add them under names like “Blue Table” or “The Lounge” — the 40-contestant limit leaves plenty of room.

Enter the round total when you close the round, not question by question. The board animates the new standings the moment the round lands — the best possible time for the host to turn the screen towards the room while reading the next category.

Leave the tie-break on “last round”: between two contestants on the same total, the one who did better in the final category comes out ahead. That removes the need for a classic tie-break question most of the time.

005

Everyone scores everyone: jury mode

If you are scoring performances rather than answers — a singing contest, presentations, a cook-off — switch on PointSim’s “everyone scores everyone” mode. Each contestant then scores the others and the round total is built from those jury votes, the same structure you see in Eurovision-style contests.

Set the scoring method to a non-repeating point pool and each juror can hand out a fixed set of scores (12·10·8·7·6·5, say) only once. Nobody can give everyone a 10, and the result becomes a genuine order of preference.

006

Long format: an elimination round

For an eight-round evening, add elimination. A score threshold works best in this format: at the end of round four, anyone below the total you set drops off the board and the rest play the final.

A fixed number of eliminations per round also works, but it is harsh over short rounds — one bad category and a contestant is gone. A threshold leaves room to recover from a bad round, which is fairer with a crowd.