Hosting a 2023 Quiz of the Year and need ideas, questions and answers, then read on!
Where do I start?
Firstly, you need to consider where you are going to be hosting your 2023 quiz of the year. This will probably dictate how you will be hosting and presenting your quiz.
Are you hosting in a sports bar where you can plug your laptop into the screens around the bar? If so, you can use the PowerPoint Presentation downloaded from gquiz.net. The questions and answers will appear on the screen and remain there until you (as host) are happy to move to the next question. This is particularly useful if you have people of different nationalities in your audience. The questions and answers are written in English so some people may need longer to understand the question and discuss the answers.
What if you you don’t have the ability to connect to a screen? No problem. When you download from gquiz.net you also get a Word version of the quiz. This enables you print the questions and answers beforehand and take them with you. Take care to monitor the room in this instance. Look for people in the audience who don’t have English as their first language. Allow adequate time to ensure they are included.
What Comes Next When Planning Your 2023 Quiz of the Year?
Now we know how we will be presenting, the next thing is how long do we want it to last? Normally pub quizzes tend to run for approximately 2 hours. This will allow for 5 or 6 rounds of questions and answers, depending upon how fast you want to push the audience.
Bear in mind though that as far as the audience is concerned, going too slow is as bad, if not worse than going too fast. Long pauses between rounds will lead to people losing interest, start talking or playing on their phones. Too fast and people won’t have time to think and discuss possible answers within the team. Another thing to affect timings is what type of questions you want to use. Straightforward question and answers will be quicker than giving a picture round for example. This requires more thinking time, especially if you hand out a separate sheet of pictures where you can’t control the pace of team discussions.
So now we have our venue, chosen the best way to present the quiz and decided the length (how many rounds). What comes next? The subjects!
Subjects For Your 2023 Quiz of the Year
What subjects to choose? Firstly, think about your audience for a 2023 Quiz of the Year. More often than not a quiz of the year will be held around Christmas/New Year. This is a time when families come together. The teams in front of you may consist of grandparents, parents and kids.
Try and select topics and questions in which everyone will feel able to contribute. There’s nothing worse than sitting in a quiz for 2 hours not being able to answer a single question. So where to start? Personally, I started with a stalwart of every quiz!
General Knowledge
When you start to dig into a year’s worth of General Knowledge, it soon becomes apparent that there’s a lot to choose from. Far too much for just ten questions. This is why I decided that my 2023 Quiz of the Year would have TWO General Knowledge rounds. One round for January to June and another July to December.
Once again it is important to remember your audience. Questions should reflect a various age groups and specialities. When researching General Knowledge it then allows you to start to categorise further topics and some old favourites appear………
Sport
In the 12 month period of 2023 there has been a lot of sport. You have ten questions to try and include every team member and all age groups. Six or seven questions on Premiership Football will alienate many in the room. Think about what different sports have occurred.
In 2023 there has been the Super Bowl, Horse Racing, Cricket World Cup, Women’s Football World Cup, Tennis, Formula 1 and of course The Ryder Cup. All of this is in addition to Premiership Football so plenty of opportunity to keep it varied and inclusive.
Entertainment
I chose ‘Entertainment’ as a subject because it covers so much more than just ‘2023 Music’ or ‘2023 Films’. It opens up so many different topics to give everyone a chance. Entertainment covers films, highest grossing, The Oscars, Music, most downloaded App and television.
Major Events
There seemed to be so many ‘Major Events’ in 2023 that they deserved their own round of questions. There has been hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, the loss of the submersible and of course the Coronation of King George III.
No Longer With Us
This may seem a bit morbid for round of quiz questions, especially at what is party time. However, it is also a great way to start conversations within the team as they recount their memories of growing up with these people. One sad loss this year was David McCallum. The grandparents in the team can reminisce about his time as agent Illya Kuryakin in The Man From Uncle in the 1960s. The kids will look on bewildered thinking they are the only ones that know him because of his role as Ducky in NCIS.
In 2023 we sadly lost some great musical artists, TV personalities and film stars so a little time to look back is always a good thing.
Prepare Yourself for Your 2023 Quiz of the Year!
When you have downloaded the questions from gquiz.net it is always best to read and familiarise yourself with both the questions and answers. This will ensure that you, as host, are prepared and can read the questions clearly and concisely, making you sound like an expert!
That’s the questions sorted, now we need to think about how we are going to mark the answers.
Marking
When it comes to the marking, you have a choice between two methods in reality. You can either collect all the papers and mark them yourself, or ask the teams to swap papers and they mark each others. Both methods have good and bad points.
Marking Yourself
This ensures that every paper is marked to the same standard. However it will take considerably longer to do it this way, especially if you have a lot of teams taking part. If it takes too long people will become bored and fidgety and will lose interest in the quiz.
Swapping the papers
This is the most popular method. This reduces the time taken and helps to keep people involved in the quiz. However be prepared to have team members approach you as they feel their paper has been marked incorrectly. This is a frequent occurrence in my experience so be prepared to arbitrate. Remember though, whatever you decide about an answer should be communicated to all teams. ALL papers should then be corrected as required.
Scoring
In my experience people like to know how their team is performing. This adds to the competitive edge and the fun. It also allows teams to correct any errors in the marking. When you reveal the answers, teams will be counting how many answers they got correct (my team certainly does!). If there’s any discrepancies they can be sorted there and then.
The type of scoreboard obviously depends upon the equipment you have to hand. If you are projecting the quiz onto a screen then using a simple Excel spreadsheet to keep the teams informed adds to the atmosphere as you type the results in. Otherwise a simple pencil and paper will suffice.
Remember that a quiz is for fun. The aim is for people to be competitive, but have a good evening. The aim is not to embarrass any team or anyone in particular. There’s no point setting a quiz so obscure that everybody low scores, this is not fun. I have written the questions so that most teams should get 5 or more answers correct. The better teams will be around 7 or 8 and the teams challenging for the lead will be 9 or 10. If they don’t know the answer I like to think that they are saying ‘of course, I should have remembered that’ rather than ‘don’t know anything about that, never heard of it’. Give everyone a chance.
So we have selected the questions, sorted the venue and decided how we are going to mark the answers. Now we need to think about what is possibly the most contentious part of the quiz, the ground rules!
Setting the Ground Rules for Your 2023 Quiz of the Year
Now we come to perhaps the most contentious part of you 2023 Quiz of the Year, the ground rules. How do you want to manage your quiz? One of the hardest things to do is make sure that there’s no cheating. Make it clear that mobile phones are not to be used during the rounds. You could also announce that any team caught using their phones will not get any points for that round.
Another thing that can cause friction between the teams is the number of people in the team. Most quizzes I have attended place a limit on team size at six. For a 2023 Quiz of the Year it will most likely be a family affair. You probably don’t want to split families up so what can you do? You could introduce a handicap system. For example, a team will lose a point for every person over the recommended six in the team. This will appease both the smaller teams and the larger teams prepared to accept the points reduction.
So, now we have sorted the venue, sorted out the questions, decided on how we are going to mark the questions and decided on the ground rules. What else is left to do? Only to enjoy the night, have fun and good luck!