70 Pub Quiz Questions, Sorted by Where They Belong

Every pub quiz question does a job. Some open the night and get every table on the scoreboard. Some separate the good teams from the lucky ones. Some exist only to settle a draw at half eleven when everyone wants to go home. Sort your questions by that job rather than by subject and the quiz stops sagging in the middle.

Below are 70 questions with answers, grouped by where they belong in a running order: 12 warm-ups, 16 mid-round separators, 10 that look harder than they are, 16 for specialist rounds, 10 wipeouts and 6 tiebreakers. Lift the lot for a one-off night, or treat the categories as a template for writing your own.

One note on accuracy: anything involving a record, a population or a current title-holder goes stale. Check those before you read them out, or a team will check them for you.

Round one: 12 warm-up questions every table should get

The first round is not a filter. Its job is to get every team on the scoreboard, talking to each other and confident enough to argue about round four. Aim for an average table getting eight or nine out of twelve. Open with a hard round and you lose the room for the rest of the night.

Read these slower than feels natural, and repeat each one once. Half the room is still at the bar.

16 general knowledge questions that separate the tables

Target: roughly half the room gets each one. That's the sweet spot for a scoring spread, and it's where most quizzes are actually won and lost.

Be honest about the murky ones. Moon counts change. 'Largest desert' is Antarctica if you go by area rather than heat (NerdSip). 'Largest organ' is skin unless you say internal (faabul.com). If a table argues, check — they may well be right.

Want a deeper pool at this exact difficulty without writing it yourself? Trivialism's question bank is human-written and sorted into three difficulty levels across roughly 90 topics, and anything that looks wrong can be flagged in-game and sent to a review queue.

10 questions that look harder than they are

A question a table can argue its way to is worth three they either know or don't. Nobody repeats a question they simply knew. They repeat the one where someone at the table worked it out from a half-remembered scrap and got it right.

Give these an extra ten seconds each. The working-out is the point, not the recall.

16 specialist round questions: music, sport, film, food and geography

The near-universal categories are music, film and TV, sport, geography and history (NerdSip), so those are the safe bets. In a real quiz give each round 8–10 questions; here are four from each to build on.

Music

Sport

Film and TV

Food, drink and geography

Don't stack two specialist rounds back to back. Sport followed by music wipes out every table that hasn't got one of each.

10 wipeout questions for the final round

One hard round near the end does two jobs: it opens a gap at the top, and it gives the leaders somewhere to go. Say the quiet part out loud before you start — "two or three each is a good score here" — and nobody feels stupid for getting two.

Hard rounds only work when the answer is satisfying. Read a one-line fact after each one and "nobody got that" lands as a shared joke rather than a telling-off.

For a family night, drop the wipeout entirely and put a picture round or a music intro round in the same slot (NerdSip).

6 tiebreakers that actually settle a draw

A tiebreaker has to be a number nobody knows. Ask a recall question and you just create a second draw. Ask for an estimate and the nearest guess wins (NerdSip).

Half of those need a figure looked up before the night. That's normal for estimation questions, and it's why you write the answer down in advance.

Three rules:

• Collect tiebreaker answers at the start, on the same sheet, so nobody confers at the end.
• Say out loud that nearest wins, over or under.
• Have a second one ready. Two tables writing the same round number happens more than you'd think.

Running it on a screen instead?

Turning 70 questions into a proper quiz night

A running order, using the sets above:

1. Warm-up (12)
2. General knowledge (16)
3. Specialist round one
4. Break — 15 minutes, sell some drinks
5. The deceptive ten
6. Specialist round two
7. Wipeout finale (10)
8. Tiebreaker, if you need it

That's roughly 70 questions and about 90 minutes including the break.

Timing

Read each question twice, allow 20–30 seconds, then read the whole round back before you collect sheets. A ten-question round takes about ten minutes — considerably longer than most first-time hosts budget for.

Marking

Swap sheets between tables for the early rounds and mark the final round yourself, so the winner isn't announced by a rival team. Keep a running total on a whiteboard after each round. If nobody knows the score until the end, nobody cares until the end.

Paper or screen

Pen and paper still wins in a loud pub, and a printed sheet with numbered boxes saves ten minutes of squinting at handwriting. Screens make sense when your group is spread across houses or already sitting in a Discord call. For that, you can host free on trivialism.com, pick categories and difficulty and share a room code — guests join without making an account.

Getting better at these is a little-and-often job: play today's Quiz of the Day and you'll be the one working out MCMXCIX next week.

Frequently asked questions

How do you stop teams looking answers up on their phones?

You mostly can't police it, so write rounds where a phone doesn't help. Estimation questions, where the nearest guess wins (NerdSip), reward instinct rather than search. Picture and music rounds are recognised faster than they can be typed. Keep the pace up: read each question twice, allow 20–30 seconds, move on. And name the rule out loud at the start — most tables play fair once someone's said it. Running it on a screen in Trivialism's Speed mode removes the comfortable pause altogether.

What makes a bad pub quiz question?

One with more than one defensible answer and a host who won't admit it. "Largest desert" is Antarctica if you go by area (NerdSip); "largest organ" is skin unless you specify internal (faabul.com). Those aren't clever, they're arguments waiting to happen. The other failures: questions whose answer has gone stale, questions so narrow that only one specialist in the room can get them, and questions with no route in — nothing a table can reason towards from a half-remembered scrap.

How long before quiz night should you write the questions?

About a week for a pub night, and not the afternoon of. The gap is what lets you come back with fresh eyes, spot the two questions that are secretly the same, and check anything involving a record, a population or a title-holder. Estimation tiebreakers in particular need a figure written down in advance — the Eiffel Tower's height has changed as antennae were added, so you cite one source and stick to it.

Can you reuse pub quiz questions you find online?

Yes, with two conditions: rewrite the wording and check the answer. Nobody owns the fact that Canberra is the capital of Australia (NerdSip), but lifting a whole set verbatim is both lazy and risky — your regulars read the same lists you do. Checking matters because sources disagree. One credits Tim Berners-Lee with inventing the World Wide Web in 1990 (EF United Kingdom), another says 1989, at CERN in Geneva (faabul.com). Pick your source and be ready to accept both.

How do you set questions that work for a mixed-age crowd?

Spread the decades and favour questions with a visible route in. A single round of chart music from one decade quietly excludes half the room; a history question with an anchor doesn't — the Berlin Wall went up in 1961 (Peacock Quizzes) and came down in 1989 (NerdSip), and most people can place one of those. Reasoning questions level the field best of all: how many hearts an octopus has is guessable by a nine-year-old and an eighty-year-old alike.