Set the mood. Choose one of these party invitations to create and send your invitation.
Everybody loves a quiz night — the tension, the competition, the beer drinking. Whether you are holding your contest in your local pub, church hall or even your own living room, the key is to make sure you get enough people together and that they’re divided into reasonably even teams in terms of both numbers and geekiness.
To get your venue set up, make sure that tables and chairs are positioned so that the teams are reasonably safe from peeping eyes. Then make sure you have plenty of answer papers and pencils close to hand.
Attire isn’t particularly important to the success of your quiz night, but to spice up the night, ask each team to come in themed fancy dress with the best-dressed team winning extra points. Alternatively, you can get your participants to dress up as proper quiz show nerds. Think University Challenge or Blockbusters circa 1982 — all NHS specs, greased back hair and tight tank tops.
Your Quiz Master should sport a bowtie, a tight suit and a heavy regional accent. If you have a “lovely assistant” to mark up scores on a scoreboard, all the better. Her dress should be one of two extremes: Schoolmarm severity or ditzy chorus girl spangles — nothing in between will do.
The quiz itself should be the main focus of the proceedings. An eight to ten round quiz with a break in the middle to accommodate trips to the bar / toilet / outside for a smoke works well, and try to have a theme for each round so that everyone has a chance to shine. Make sure there’s plenty of popular culture in there &mdah; music, TV, film — to balance out the serious stuff. Writing a quiz isn’t as hard as you’d think. You can buy books of questions or take them from quiz websites.
To add to the competition, try to incorporate a picture round, where teams are given a sheet of themed pictures (famous faces, stills from films) and challenged to identify them during the course of the evening. Alternatively, if you have the facilities and the technical know-how, include a music or video round in which you play brief snatches of well known pop songs or TV theme tunes for your teams to suss out. Make sure you prepare a tiebreaker question as well, should two teams end up with identical scores — and make it a really hard one!
Finally, have a really good prize for the winning team — something they can all share. Booze is usually best. A couple of bottles of wine or a crate of beer would do the trick, and the winners will probably end up sharing with the losers anyway, so everyone’ll be happy.
Good, old-fashioned pub grub like fish and chips, chicken in a basket, steak and ale pie is perfect. If you don’t have a venue that will cater for you, keep it simple with lots of crisps, dips, and omega-3-laden egg butties. If you really want to boost brainpower, lay on dishes of “superfoods” like blueberries, pomegranate and oily fish, which are practically guaranteed to get the grey cells in tip-top condition, although they won’t complement your lager quite as well as a nice bag of salt and vinegar.
| Anything goes at a Quiz Night, but to follow the great British quiz tradition, pints of foaming ale for the men, and white wine or fruit based drinks for the ladies. Although in these confusing times it’s just as likely to be the other way round. Make sure you keep your guests well hydrated throughout the evening (dehydration saps concentration) by providing plenty of still water to quench their thirst. |  |
| 1. | Questions / Jack Johnson |
| 2. | Life on Mars? / David Bowie |
| 3. | Do You Know the Way to San Jose? / Dionne Warwick |
| 4. | The Book of Love / The Monotones |
| 5. | What’s Going On? / Marvin Gaye
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| 6. | Why Do Fools Fall in Love? / The Beach Boys |
| 7. | How Can You Mend a Broken Heart / The Bee Gees |
| 8. | Do You Realize? / The Flaming Lips |
| 9. | Where Is the Love? / Black Eyed Peas |
| 10. | Who Let the Dogs Out? / Baha Men |
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