Free, printable
Pub quizzes
Written by somebody who did this for a living and has the scars. Every answer has a named source next to it.
Frankie Bexley spent years compiling quizzes for a brewery chain: question sets, by the week, to a fixed shape, read aloud by somebody who had not seen them before to a room that had been drinking.
The thing nobody tells you is that the questions are not the product. The argument is the product. People do not want to be told a fact. They want to settle something, out loud, with somebody who disagrees, and then be shown who was right.
So every answer here has a named source next to it. The Office for National Statistics, the Nationwide house price index, the Bank of England, the Official Charts Company. Not a blog, and not the last quiz that copied the quiz before it. An answer that cannot be proved does not settle anything, it just moves the argument to the car park.
Play a round
Pick a year and it builds six questions across the four rounds. Every figure, and every wrong answer offered alongside it, is a real number out of the same register the books are built from. Nothing here is invented to make a question harder.
Pick a year
Six questions, four rounds, built from the same register as the books. Pick the year somebody in the room was born and it gets personal, which is the point.
Running it in a room rather than on your own? Open the big-screen demo. Ten fixed questions, sized for a television, driven off the number keys so nobody has to stand at the screen.
The four rounds
- What did it cost. A year, a house, a week's wage, and the gap between what the room guesses and what the register says.
- What was number one. Christmas charts, which are the only charts anybody remembers.
- True or false. Statements about money and work, designed to be got wrong by confident people.
- Name the decade. Three facts, no date. The interesting part is not the guessing.
Running it in a room
The same year always gives the same six questions in the same order, so you can put two teams through it and ask them the same things. Read the question, take the answers, then reveal. The source line under each answer is the bit that ends the argument before it reaches the car park.
Also
There is a pub games page, for the bit of the evening after the quiz when nobody wants to think any more.