1. Know Your Audience
Its important to keep in mind who you're writing the quiz for. Are they old or young? Do they have any special interests? Nobody wants to do an impossible quiz or sit through two hours of niche questions that they have no idea about. If in doubt, stick to staples: General Knowledge, Music, Pictures and History are the most universal rounds.
2. Open Questions or Multiple Choice?
Another choice to make early on is whether to give possible answers or leave people to give their own answer. Multiple choice questions avoid misspelling or half right answers but can make a quiz too easy. I would tend to use multiple choice only for those really tricky questions; everyone can then get involved and try and work it out.
3. Team Size
It's important to put limits on team sizes. 4-6 is usually a reasonable size unless you have a good reason to go with more or less. If teams are too big some people will feel left out, too small and people won't be able to socialise. Be careful if you don't set a limit, a team of 12 playing against a group of four is hardly fair!
4. What Topic for Each Round?
One important principal to keep in mind is variety. A long quiz of purely spoken questions can get dull. Break up your quiz with a picture and or music round in the middle. Some good themes for rounds are: History, Geography, Literature, Science, General Knowledge, Sport and Music
5. Special Rounds
A whole round on cycling can be good if you know you've got a lot of cyclists in the room, or in a regular quiz a different 'Niche' round every week can be good. Good guidelines are to keep it short and don't make it too tricky. A fiendishly difficult round on 14th Century Austrian Literature is not going to go down well.
6. Writing Questions
Writing the questions themselves can be time consuming. Wikipedia is a great resource for browsing around a topic and finding good nuggets of information. One nice tip when writing a question is to give two ways to the answer, this lets people with different specialisms contribute to the team,
7. Still Struggling? Use One Of Ours
If you don't want to go to the trouble of writing your own quiz, use one of ours! So long as you're not using our questions for commercial reasons, you're free to use them, we'd just ask that you mention where you got them from! If you want to use them for commercial reasons do get in touch and I'm sure we can sort something out.
