Marking is the bottleneck, not the questions
A quiz night goes wrong in the gaps. The questions take eight minutes a round and the marking takes twenty, so the room sits in silence while one person at the front works through thirty sheets with a red pen and everybody goes to the bar and does not come back.
The fix is old and it works: one sheet per round, swapped between teams and marked as you read the answers out. Ten minutes of dead time becomes two, and it happens with the room paying attention rather than drifting.
That only works if the sheets are separate, which is why this prints a sheet per round per team rather than one long answer sheet. A single sheet cannot be swapped until the end, and by then you are back to twenty minutes of silence.
Why the sheet count looks large
Six rounds and eight teams is forty-eight answer sheets. That is a lot of paper and it is the right amount of paper: it is the difference between a quiz that runs and a quiz that stalls four times.
How long does it take?
The tool works it out from two figures, both of which are worth knowing:
- 45 seconds a question to read it, think about it and write something down.
- About four minutes a round to swap the sheets, read the answers out, mark them and hand them back.
So six rounds of ten is roughly seventy minutes of quiz. Anything much past two hours has stopped being an evening out, and cutting a round is nearly always better than cutting the break.
The joker keeps the room in it
The real problem with a quiz is not difficulty, it is that a team out of contention by round four stops trying. They know they cannot win, so the second half is something they sit through.
A joker fixes it. One round of the team’s own choosing, doubled. A team fifteen points behind with two rounds left still has a route, so they are still playing, and the scoreboard stays interesting until the end.
It has to be declared before the round is read out. Declared afterwards it is just doubling the round they did well on, which is a different and much worse game.
It does not write the questions, and nothing should
It does not write the questions. That is the one part nobody else can do for you, and a quiz made entirely of questions downloaded from somewhere is a quiz that half the room has already seen.
What it does is everything around them: the sheets, the scoreboard, the markers for the tables, and the arithmetic that tells you whether what you have planned is seventy minutes or three hours. Everything is generated on your own machine and nothing is uploaded.
Common questions
Why one answer sheet per round instead of one for the whole quiz?
So teams can swap and mark as you go. A single sheet for the whole quiz cannot be swapped until the end, and then the room sits in silence while one person works through a pile with a red pen. Separate sheets are the only thing that stops marking becoming the longest part of the evening.
How long will my quiz take?
About 45 seconds a question to read, think and write, plus roughly four minutes a round to swap, mark and read the answers out. Six rounds of ten comes to about seventy minutes before anybody has been to the bar. It is the marking that decides the length, not the questions.
What is a joker round?
A round of the team’s own choosing where their score is doubled. It is the single best thing you can add to a quiz, because a team out of contention by round four otherwise stops caring. A joker held back means they can still win on the last round, so nobody goes home early.
When does the joker have to be declared?
Before the round is read out. Otherwise it is just a team doubling whichever round they happened to do well on, which is not the same game at all.
How many questions should a round have?
Ten. It is easy to score out of, it fits on one sheet, and it is about as much as anybody wants before a change of subject. Fifteen or twenty makes a round harder to mark and harder to sit through.
What is in the kit?
An answer sheet for every round for every team, a scoreboard with a column per round and a running total, a large round marker to stand on the tables, and a joker card per team if you are using one.
Does it write the questions?
No. The questions are the one part nobody else can do for you, and a quiz made of questions somebody downloaded is a quiz half the room has already seen. This prints everything around them.
How many teams can it handle?
Up to forty, though the bigger the room the more the swap-and-mark approach matters. Past about fifteen teams, one person marking centrally will not keep up and the gaps between rounds are where the evening is lost.