Below this introduction there's a finished 20-question quiz with answers, laid out in four rounds of five, ready to read aloud today. No hunting through a list of 400 loose questions to build something usable.
"Trivia for today" tends to mean one of two things: a quiz you can play right now, or facts tied to today's date. This guide covers both. After the quiz you'll find a repeatable method for building a "this day in history" round for whatever date it happens to be, three formats for when you've only got ten minutes, and honest options for keeping the habit going tomorrow and the day after.
On timing: four rounds of five takes roughly 25 minutes with a group, once you allow for reading questions twice and marking between rounds. Solo, reading and answering, it's about five minutes.
A 20-question quiz you can play today
Difficulty is marked (E), (M) or (H) — drop the (H)s for a younger or mixed group. Answers sit at the foot of each round, so you can read five and mark five.
Round 1 — General Knowledge
- (E) Which salty lake, uninhabitable for most life, lies between Israel and Jordan (today.com)?
- (H) What's the name for the tube on the end of a shoelace (today.com)?
- (E) What is the largest bone in the human body (today.com)?
- (M) Which blood type is the universal donor (today.com)?
- (M) Which planet is the only one to rotate clockwise on its axis (today.com)?
Answers: 1 The Dead Sea; 2 An aglet; 3 The femur; 4 O negative; 5 Venus.
Round 2 — Screen and Sound
- (E) What is James Bond's code name (today.com)?
- (M) Which actor played the title role in Columbo (thisdaytrivia.com)?
- (H) Which two actors starred as the undercover detectives in Miami Vice (thisdaytrivia.com)?
- (M) Robert Redford founded which film festival (thisdaytrivia.com)?
- (H) Nearest wins: in which year did B. B. King become the first blues singer to tour the USSR (thisdaytrivia.com)?
Answers: 1 007; 2 Peter Falk; 3 Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas; 4 Sundance; 5 1979.
Round 3 — Food and Geography
- (E) Which food is famously said never to go bad (today.com)?
- (M) Which US state is the "Land of 10,000 Lakes" (today.com)?
- (H) How many US states does the Appalachian Trail cross (today.com)?
- (M) What is the largest volcano on Earth (today.com)?
- (M) Nearest wins: how often does Yellowstone's Old Faithful erupt (today.com)?
Answers: 1 Honey; 2 Minnesota; 3 Fourteen; 4 Mauna Loa; 5 Roughly every 90 minutes.
Round 4 — Wildcard
- (E) How many cards are in a standard deck (today.com)?
- (M) What's the collective noun for a group of flamingos (today.com)?
- (E) What kind of animal was the first ever cloned (today.com)?
- (H) The Mpemba effect describes which counter-intuitive thing about freezing water (today.com)?
- (H) Nearest wins: how many elements are on the periodic table (today.com)?
Answers: 1 Fifty-two; 2 A flamboyance; 3 A sheep; 4 That hot water can freeze faster than cold (today.com); 5 118.
Four of those questions reward a confident guess rather than knowledge, which keeps casual players in contention to the end. The set works as-is for a pub table, a video call or a classroom.
Build a "this day in history" round for any date
The recipe
Five questions, five minutes: two events, two birthdays, one "what year was this". That mix gives you a self-contained opening round without needing a theme.
Here's one built from 16 September, which is close enough to today to count:
- A bomb on Wall Street killed thirty people immediately, with eight more dying later — which decade (thisdaytrivia.com)?
- Which two-piece swimsuit did Louis Réard introduce in 1946 (thisdaytrivia.com)?
- Which blues singer, born on this date, was the first of his kind to tour the USSR (thisdaytrivia.com)?
- Which magician, born on this date, made the Statue of Liberty disappear on television (thisdaytrivia.com)?
- What year was General Motors incorporated, formed by the merger of Buick and Oldsmobile (thisdaytrivia.com)?
Where to look, and what to watch for
National archive and library "on this day" pages, newspaper front-page archives, sports record books and music chart archives for the same date. Four sources, four different flavours of question.
Turn a flat fact into a question by hiding the most guessable part. Don't ask what happened — ask which decade, or which two countries signed.
One warning: "on this day" lists copy each other, errors included. If two independent sources disagree on a date, cut the question rather than defend it at the table.
Anniversaries a day or two either side are fair game. Nobody has ever complained.
Trivialism's Photo of the Day does the same job — a picture, a short story, a few facts — which is a decent model for a one-question opener.
Three formats when you've only got ten minutes
Fastest finger
Five questions, read fast. First correct answer out loud takes the point, nothing written down. On a video call it's brutal — lag decides half the points — but in a room it takes four minutes flat.
Category streak
Pick one topic, keep answering until you miss, longest run wins. It's the best of the three for one person killing ten minutes, because you're only competing with your last score.
Wager
Before each question is read, players stake points on how confident they feel. Get it right, gain the stake; get it wrong, lose it. The point is the last question: a trailing player can bet everything and steal the game, so nobody drifts off.
Doing it on paper
All three work without a device. Fastest finger needs a reader and a bit of noise tolerance. Category streak needs one person with a list of answers. Wager needs a scrap of paper per player for the stake, written down and turned over before the question is read.
Trivialism ships Fastest Finger, Category Streak and Wager as solo minigames if you'd rather not run them yourself.
If two players finish level, go Sudden Death: keep asking until one is left standing.
Where to get fresh trivia tomorrow, and the day after
The options are all fine, and none of them is better than the one you'll actually use: a quiz book on the arm of the sofa, the newspaper quiz page, a podcast quiz on the commute, an app, or a daily online quiz with a streak attached.
What makes a daily habit stick isn't the source. It's a fixed slot and a low time cost. Five questions with the first coffee, every day, beats fifty on a Sunday that you skip twice and abandon.
Streaks help until they don't
A streak is useful right up to the morning you break it and quit in disgust. If that sounds like you, pick something with an archive you can play late — the day's questions are still good questions a week later.
Trivialism's Quiz of the Day is themed, with its own leaderboard and streak, alongside a Daily Games set of Groups, Lexicon and Timeline. All of them have browsable archives, so a missed day isn't a lost day.
Rotate, and keep a note
Loyalty to one source is a slow trap. Every writer has blind spots — heavy on football, light on classical music, or the reverse — and after a month you'll have learned their habits rather than any new facts.
Keep a notebook or a phone note of the questions you got wrong. It's the cheapest way to get better, and it costs ten seconds.
Running today's quiz for a group
In a room
Read each question twice, pause for writing, then repeat it once more before you move on. It feels laborious from the front; it stops half the arguments later.
Teams of three or four are the sweet spot. Two is thin, five means someone stops contributing.
Answer sheets beat shouting. A folded A4 sheet with the rounds numbered down the side is all anyone needs, and marking is a swap-and-mark job between rounds.
On a video call
Ask for answers in the chat, all submitted on your "go" so nobody reads the room first. If you want to stop copying entirely, take them as private messages to the host — slower to collect, but airtight.
Mixed and remote groups
This is where a shared screen earns its keep. On Trivialism the host picks categories, difficulty and mode, then shares a room code or link, and guests can play without making an account — useful when half the group won't sign up for anything.
Scoring, tiebreaks and settling arguments
One point a question is fine. A bonus point for a clean sweep of a round is worth adding: it pushes teams to gamble on the two they aren't sure of rather than leave them blank.
For a tiebreak, a nearest-wins question settles things in thirty seconds. Sudden death is better theatre, but not at eleven o'clock when people want their coats.
Say these out loud before round one
- Spelling: names spelled roughly right count, unless the spelling is the question.
- Phones: face-down on the table — or allowed for one designated "open round", so the temptation has somewhere to go.
- Disputes: the host's ruling is final, but a host who voids a question that turns out to be wrong keeps more goodwill than one who dies on the hill.
On Trivialism any question can be flagged mid-game and goes to a review queue — the digital version of the same principle. If you'd rather someone else wrote tonight's questions, play today's Quiz of the Day.
Frequently asked questions
How many questions should a quiz night have?
For a full evening, aim for 40 to 60 questions split into six to eight rounds, which fills roughly two hours with marking and a break. For a single hour, 20 questions in four rounds is plenty — that's the length of the quiz above, and it runs to about 25 minutes with a group. Over-writing is the common mistake: people leave at a natural end point, not when the questions run out.
What's a good mix of easy and hard questions?
Roughly half easy, a third medium, and only a handful of genuinely hard ones. A table that scores two out of five in round one stops trying. The harder questions earn their place as separators near the end of a round, not as openers. Add two or three "nearest wins" questions as well — how many US states the Appalachian Trail crosses (today.com), say — because a confident guess keeps casual players in contention.
How do I stop people googling the answers?
Phones face-down on the table, said out loud before round one, does most of the work. Beyond that, design helps: nearest-wins questions, picture rounds and "name all six" list questions are slow to search under time pressure. Read at a pace that doesn't allow typing. If trust is the problem, go device-free entirely, or host on a shared screen — on Trivialism the timer runs whether or not someone is searching, and guests can join with a room code without an account.
Is it legal to use trivia questions I found online for a charity quiz?
We're not lawyers, so treat this as practical caution rather than legal advice. Lifting a published quiz wholesale and reprinting it on an answer sheet is the risky end; writing your own questions from facts you've looked up is the safe end. In practice, rewrite in your own words, mix sources rather than copying one set, and check the terms on any site you lean on. Many quiz writers will say yes if you email and credit them.
What can I use instead of teams when there are only two or three of us?
Play as individuals and change the format rather than forcing teams. Wager works brilliantly with two or three, because a trailing player can stake everything on the last question. Category streak suits three people taking turns, and fastest finger needs no scoring at all. If you want a proper head-to-head, Trivialism runs synchronised 1v1 duels against a friend or a random opponent, plus asynchronous challenges by code when you can't play at the same time.