Trivia Questions
194 questions with answers, across 9 packs. Read them out, reveal, and keep score only if you want to.
What is the chemical symbol for gold?
Question packs
140 questions in the packs you have on.
Questions per round
Keeping score
Off by default — plenty of people just want the questions.
How to run it
- 1Pick your packs. General knowledge is on to start with — tap any others you want mixed in.
- 2Decide whether you are keeping score. Off is fine, and it is the default; turn on two to four teams if you want a winner.
- 3Read the question out. Twice is better than once, and the second time should be slower.
- 4Tap Reveal when the room has stopped arguing, and read the answer plus the line underneath it.
- 5Say who got it, and the next question comes up. At the end of the round you get the scoreboard.
The trick to running it well
Almost every home quiz is spoiled by the same thing, and it is not the questions. It is adjudication— the moment somebody says “Beethoven” when the card says Ludwig van Beethoven, or writes 1946 when the answer is 1945, and the room has to decide on the spot whether that counts. Whoever is holding the phone becomes a judge they never agreed to be, and every ruling after that looks like a favour to somebody.
The fix costs ten seconds and has to happen before the first question: say the rules out loud. A surname on its own counts, a first name on its own does not. A year is right within one either way. Spelling never matters. Nobody minds a strict rule; they mind a rule that appeared the moment it went against them.
The second thing is how the question is read. Read it twice — once at normal speed so people hear the shape of it, once more slowly so they catch the part that matters. And do not editorialise before the answer. “Ooh, this is a good one” tells the room it is a trick question, and “you should all get this” makes the people who do not feel stupid for the rest of the round. Read it flat and let the question do its own work.
The failure mode nobody plans for is the one person who knows everything. Every group has one, and on a mixed team they simply answer for everyone else, which means five people are watching one person play. Two fixes, both better than pretending it is not happening: make them the host, which is genuinely the most fun job, or put them on their own team of one. A team of one against teams of three is closer than anyone expects, and it is the only arrangement where everybody at the table gets to say something.
One house rule worth adopting: let teams confer out loud rather than in whispers. Whispering makes a quiz feel like an exam, and the best part of a quiz is listening to four people talk themselves out of the right answer. You lose a little rigour and gain the entire evening.
Why hard questions are worth more
A quiz scored one point a question is decided by round two, and for a reason charades is not: general knowledge is distributed very unevenly. The team with the person who reads a lot simply knows more things, and flat scoring turns that into a lead nothing can touch. By round three the other teams have stopped guessing, because guessing has stopped mattering.
Weighting by difficulty fixes it without patronising anyone. A team three points down takes one hard question and is level. That changes the behaviour at the table rather than just the arithmetic — a team that is behind starts wanting the hard ones, which is the opposite of how a losing team normally feels, and it means the last round is the one people care about most.
The difficulty is shown before the answer rather than after, deliberately. A room that knows a question is worth three points argues about it for longer and takes it more seriously, and a room that knows one is worth one point stops agonising and moves on. The badge is pacing information as much as it is scoring information.
What's in the question packs
Two packs are seasonal and start switched off, so a quiz in July never serves Christmas questions. Everything else is on by default.
🧠 General knowledge
20 questions — a bit of everything, no specialism needed
🔬 Science & nature
20 questions — bodies, chemistry, space and animals
🏛️ History
20 questions — empires, wars and people who changed things
🗺️ Geography
20 questions — capitals, coastlines and where things are
🎬 Film & TV
20 questions — screens big and small
🎵 Music
20 questions — pop, classical and how instruments work
🍽️ Food & drink
20 questions — kitchens, ingredients and where dishes come from
🎄 Christmas
30 questions — carols, films and where the traditions came from
🎃 Halloween
24 questions — monsters, superstitions and where the night came from
What is deliberately not here
There is no sport pack, and that is a decision rather than an oversight. Sport is one of the biggest quiz categories there is, and it is also the one that rots fastest: a record, a champion or a squad is wrong within a season, and a page that sits here for two years would be wrong for most of them. The sport questions that do stay true tend to be the ones a general room cannot answer.
The same rule removed a handful of questions that would otherwise have been obvious inclusions. The longest river in the world is not here, because whether it is the Nile or the Amazon depends on where you start measuring and a host has no way to settle it. Anything phrased as “the biggest” or “the most” only survived where the margin is so large it will not change.
It is a smaller bank than it could be. It is a bank you can read out without checking first, which is the thing that actually matters when thirty people are waiting for you to say whether they were right.
Common questions
- How do you run a quiz at home?
- One person holds the phone and reads each question out twice — once at normal speed, once slower. Everyone else answers out loud or writes it down. Tap Reveal, read the answer, then say who got it. Ten questions takes about five minutes, which is why it is the default round length.
- How many questions should a quiz round be?
- Ten. It is what a pub quiz round is, it takes about five minutes, and it is short enough that a team having a bad round knows another one is coming. Twenty and thirty are there for a proper quiz night, and there is a no-limit option for groups who do not want to be stopped.
- Do I have to keep score?
- No, and it is off by default. A lot of people want questions to read out rather than a game to run, so the quiz opens with no teams and no setup. Turning scoring on is one tap, and you can rename the teams.
- What do I do about half-right answers?
- Decide before the first question, not during the argument. The usual rule is that a surname alone counts and a first name alone does not, and that a year is right within one either way. Any rule works as long as it was agreed before anyone gained by it.
- How does the scoring work?
- Each question is worth its difficulty: an easy one scores 1, a tricky one 2, a hard one 3. A team that is behind can take two hard questions and be level again, which is what stops a quiz being decided in the first round.
- Can one person play on their own?
- Yes. With scoring off it is just question, reveal, next — which is what most people searching for trivia questions actually want. Nothing asks you to name a team or count anything.
- Are the questions suitable for children?
- The general knowledge, science, geography and food packs are safe for a mixed-age room and work well in a classroom. The film and music packs assume a few decades of general cultural knowledge, so a room of under-tens will find them hard rather than unsuitable.
- Is there a Christmas or Halloween quiz?
- Yes — both are packs here, and both have their own page with questions written specifically for the occasion. They are switched off by default so that a quiz in July does not serve Christmas questions.
- Why is there no sport round?
- Because sport answers go out of date faster than any other category — a champion, a record or a transfer is wrong within a season, and a quiz that is confidently wrong is worse than one that is short. The packs here are chosen so the answers stay true.