By Alex McCord
Hosting virtual lockdown quiz night?
Try these ideas on family and friends
We imagine you’re the last to volunteer to host the quiz? Don’t worry – here are our lockdown quiz tips. The lockdown has turned many a virtual gathering into a trivia showdown. And who knew playing quizmaster could be such an utterly thankless task?
It doesn’t help that everyone seems to be upping their quiz game. Your arty cousin illustrated an entire picture round by hand. Your musical sibling performed a live ‘beat the intro’ round on a Baby Grand piano. Show-offs.
To offer some inspiration, here are our top tips for a fun and slightly different lockdown quiz – some pinched from friends who ripped them from off other friends who stole them from their friends.
Mix up your questions
Consider your audience and what they know. A good quiz isn’t about showing off your own knowledge: your participants will lose heart if they can’t answer anything. Include questions from a broad range of different categories and include some questions with guessable answers (closest wins). One of the best we’ve seen was a ‘price is right’ round, where participants must guess the price of bizarre range products being sold on the internet. For really tough questions, offer multiple choice answers.
Design an icebreaker
If your quiz participants don’t know each other well (or just need some encouragement to let loose), open with an icebreaker round. One of the best we’ve seen involved recreating famous paintings with items from around your house, in under one minute…
Make it personal
Why not write some questions about the people you’re quizzing? Sneak through old Facebook photos and make people guess where and when they were taken or zoom in close on grandma and let people guess who’s in the picture. This always goes down well.
Get people moving
If you’re anything like us, you’re spending more time on your phone than potentially ever… Get people moving during your lockdown quiz. Why not ask people to make a hat out of a sheet of newspaper, recreate a famous film scene using household objects, or draw a portrait of themselves? As quizmaster, you get to award points for the most impressive.
Use board games
If you’ve not had time to write a quiz from scratch, dig out Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit and get playing. If you need to share cards with players, send photos via Whatsapp.
Try out some tech
If you have a bit more time on your hands, there are tech tools that can help you put together a good lockdown quiz with a personal touch. Look at Kahoot!, QuizBean or ProProfs Quiz maker (built for teachers) to create interactive quizzes. Or try Google Quick Draw for a Pictionary round.
We hope you now feel confident as the quizmaster to produce the best lockdown quiz, with plenty of different rounds and fun ways to endure lockdown.
