A List of Interesting Trivia Formats!

Cool question formats for your next zoom or live trivia with friends!

Photos by Sean Benesh and Gabriel Benois on Unsplash

Basic

• Simple Question (no options)
• Simple Question (with options)
• Buzzer rounds! (Use a free buzzer app or a website such as http://buzzin.live)

Fun

• Who said the quote?
• Nextflix/IMDB descriptions! (Guess the movie/tv show)

Audio/Visual:

• Identify the image
• Identify the company/organization logo (aka the capitalism test)
• Identify the sound (could be music, animal sounds, space sounds etc)
• Songs played very slow — identify the song
• Songs played very fast — identify the song
• Music mashup — identify both songs
• Play only the instrumental/background music — identify the song
• Show first letters of each song line on screen — identify the song

Audio/Visual (Entertainment):

• Identify celebrities from young photos, only by eyes, only by smile etc
• Guess the movie poster (with text removed)
• 15 second clip of its theme song — guess the TV show
• Play a movie soundtrack — guess the movie
• Audio clips of famous dialogues — guess the movie

Connection Questions:

• Connection between answers (answers are related thematically )
  — Which is the oldest national park in America? (Yellowstone)
  — Who’s first novel was entitled ‘Digital Fortress’? (Dan Brown)
  — Which water body did Moses part? (Red Sea)
  — Who is the murder victim in the board game Cluedo? (Dr. Black)
  Connection: Colors
• Connection between answers (answers are related abstractly)
  — First Disney Princess with a star on Hollywood walk of Fame? (S. White)
  — What’s the SI unit of force? (Newton)
  — In what American city would you find Little Italy? (New York)
  — Which Coldplay singer married Gwyneth Paltrow in 2003? (Chris Martin)
  Connection: Apple
  (Snow white ate the poisonous apple, apple fell on Newton’s head, New York is called the Big Apple, Chris Martin’s daughters’ name is Apple)

You could have extra points for guessing the theme, but keep in mind that guessing the theme might already help participants get more points as they can use that knowledge to back-solve missed questions. You could also have a question that asks participants for the ‘next answer’ if the first four answers form a series.

• Connection between question/question numbers and answers (for example, the answer for the tenth question has the word ‘ten’ or ‘tenth’ or ‘decade’ in it)
• Connection between 3/4 images on screen:

Connection between images on screen: Monopoly (King’s Cross Station, Angel Islington, Go, Leicester Square)

Closest Guess:

• Guess the number (closest to the actual number or within a range wins)
• Guess the distance between 2 places
• Guess the fastest: Eg: Start listing a movie cast from the bottom, and go upwards until a team makes a guess.

Geography

• Identify a location on map (closest answer or within a certain radius wins)
• Identify the famous landmark/city/place
• Identify the skyline

Questions with multiple answers:

• Name one from a list of answers (points based on how unique) Eg: Name a professor at Hogwarts who taught for more than 1 year
• Best of the Rest (Name the best other than the top 2) Eg: 2 Longest Rivers are Nile and Amazon. Name the next longest. Points can be based on how close they are — so third longest gets 3 points, fourth longest gets 2 points, 5th longest gets 1 point and so on…
• Scrabble point system: points assigned based on starting letters. Eg: Name 3 capital cities. If someone answer Quito, Kathmandu, and Dhaka, they get 10 (Q) + 5 (K) + 2 (D) = 17 points.

Order

• Twitter battle: rank people based on their number of followers
• Age battle: rank people based on their age
• Time battle: order events based on when they occurred
• Height battle: order people/things by height

Keep in mind — some people dislike such questions as messing up one usually means that they’ve messed up a bunch more.

Other Tips:

• Start off with an easy question (good confidence builder for participants, so they have more fun as the game progresses!)
• Make sure the scoring is balanced across rounds (so that performing good or bad in one round doesn’t mean they’ve won/lost the entire game!)
• If you’re struggling to make a ‘general’ trivia with questions on various topics, choose a theme instead (a category such as sports or entertainment)!

Thanks, and do let me know if there are other formats that I haven’t included in the list!