Our Guide to Hosting the Best At-Home Quiz Night

At-home quiz nights are a great way to get your friends and family together, and even now after the pandemic is over, quizzes are still just as popular.

Before you jump into making your quiz, check out our complete guide below to hosting an at-home quiz night. From quiz themes to equipment checklists, we’ve outlined everything you need to be the ultimate quiz host.

What type of quiz formats are there?

One of the first things you will need to decide when hosting an at-home quiz night, is the format you want your quiz to be in.

Pen and paper

Pen and paper is the traditional format for quizzes at home. You as the host read your questions off a piece of paper and your contestants will write down their answers on their own sheet of paper.

Alternatively, you could present your questions from a powerpoint, giving contestants the opportunity to read the question, as well as listen to you speaking it.

Pen and paper quizzes typically have 5 or more rounds to them, with 7 or more questions for each round. This could take around 2 hours to complete including breaks.

One of our ‘This week’s Tabletop quizzes’ or ‘This week’s Picture Quiz’ will make for a great first round, and because it is current, it looks like you have done all the hard work prepping the quiz. You simply download and print-off

Phone based

A different, more interactive way of hosting your quiz night is by making your contestants use their smartphones or tablets.

Sites like Kahoot! allow you to input your own questions and multiple choice answers that your contestants have to choose between. This is much quicker paced than traditional pen and paper, and contestants will only have a short time to select the right answer, though these sites can be limited in original questions.

Downloadable Quizzes

At Quiz on Demand, you can easily and quickly buy and download a range of quizzes to suit your guests, meaning that you won’t have to spend time scouring the internet for great quiz questions!

We do all the hard work for you, so you get on with party planning and simply download the most relevant quizzes for you, use them on your phone or print them, and away you go!

The Tabletop Quiz and the Facerace Picture quiz are especially good, plus they are all ready to use. Simply hand them out at the start of your quiz. Your teams get on with working them out and filling in the answers. These quizzes generally take 20 to 30 minutes to complete, then you can move onto the question rounds.

Individuals or teams?

Depending on how many contestants you have, you may be able to separate them into teams. If this is the case, we recommend going for the traditional pen and paper format, since it may be difficult for everyone to see one phone screen.

Plus, the engagement between team members discussing a possible answer builds a great atmosphere. You don’t want it to be like an exam.

What quiz rounds should I have for a quiz night?

Once you’ve established what sort of format you’d like to go for, it can be much easier to determine the themes of your quiz and the type of rounds you’d like to include.

When thinking of your rounds, you should determine what kind of questions you’d like to include. Switching up the format can help to make the quiz more exciting, and will keep your contestants on their toes.

Some popular types of questions for at home quizzes include:

Open-ended
True or false
Multiple choice
Audio or visual rounds
Table Top Quiz
Picture Quiz

With multiple choice and true or false rounds, luck is involved, so use these sparingly.

To find questions for content, head over to our Quiz On Demand quizzes. We have a great choice of different themed quizzes that you can choose from, and the best part is, we’ve done all the hard work for you.

Our quizzes are made with reputable sources, meaning you can be assured that there is only one right answer!

How to choose the best topics for an at home quiz

Choosing topics for your quiz can be tricky, especially if you are hosting for a few people you’ve never met before or you just have a mixed bunch of contestants.

Ideally, you should choose a good mix of topics that you people are guaranteed to know and others that might have people scratching their heads.

You could include some questions that reference recent events, history, general trivia and more obscure knowledge too.

Again, if you need some assistance deciding what topics to go for, or you want to choose a more niche topic, head over to our online Quizzes and download a few different topics.

Our guide on Quiz Round Ideas may inspire you and help you to narrow down your options!

How to prepare for a quiz night

The day before, or even the day of your quiz, you should start preparing for it. There are a few easy steps you can take to ensure you’re ready to be a great quiz host.

Make an equipment list

Depending on the format of your quiz, your equipment list will vary.

If you’re doing a pen and paper quiz, you should collect the following equipment:

Pens or pencils
Paper for answers
Scoring sheet for yourself (optional)
Laptop and HDMI cable to connect to a screen (if you have a slideshow, etc)

If you’re using smartphones for the quiz, you will likely only need your laptop connected to a TV screen or monitor.

Get your questions ready

You’ll need to block out a lot of time to create your own quizzes, in advance of your games night. Alternatively, you can easily buy our affordable online quizzes and download them immediately, saving you plenty of time to move onto the next steps!

Plan a tiebreaker

When you’re hosting a quiz, it’s important not to forget about a tie break question.

You can simply reserve one of your questions from a previous round to use as a tie break, or you could make a new one up which is completely different to any other round you’ve created.

Prepare a prize

One thing that adds to the competitive nature of the quizzes is by including a prize. Prizes don’t have to be huge; many contestants will appreciate any prize, even if it is something small like a bar of chocolate!

If you often have different quiz nights at different houses, you could have a rolling prize that everyone chips in for. The person with the most points, or most quiz wins, will then win this prize.

You could also raise the stakes by introducing a “losers prize”, in which the person who comes last has to do some sort of forfeit like buying the first round of drinks when you next go out.

Plan breaks

Your quiz may not be long enough to have breaks, but you could make a rough idea of when to have a break between rounds.

Breaks give your contestants time to grab a drink, have some snacks and go to the toilet. However, make sure no one cheats when having a break!

Being a great host

Remember, it is down to you to steer the quiz night and to keep it impartial and entertaining. If your team finds it too difficult, they will lose interest. If you see a lot of blank faces simply make the questions easier.

You can do this as you go, adding multiple choice answers or a few clue words to the questions. Here’s some examples below:

Who married the Bond girl Barbara Bach in 1981? RINGO STARR

Too hard? Change ‘Who’ to ‘Which drummer’, or even ‘Which Beatle’.

‘Help is only 40 million miles away’ was a tagline from which 2015 film? THE MARTIAN

Once again, if you feel the question is too difficult for your guests just add ‘by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon’ at the end of the question.

Get yourself ready

Finally, it’s worth getting yourself ready for the quiz. To do this, you could consider what outfit you’re going to be wearing, what drinks and snacks you want to serve and any interactive elements in between rounds.

Quiz nights are made to be fun, so don’t get yourself worked over trying to perfect it. At Quiz On Demand, we’re here to help make at home quiz nights slightly easier for you.