The Best Quiz Round Ideas, From Funny To Challenging To Mortally Embarrassing

There's nothing more entertaining than discovering a friend's long-hidden bad opinion, and this should winkle out a few of them. Get each of your players to answer a different question about something – which of a few mutual friends you'd be happiest to go on the run with after a bank heist, for instance, or who you'd trust most to give you a lockdown haircut – and get them to record their answer in a voice note that they send over before you gather for the quiz itself. The quiz element here is incidental, but there's a very appealing theatrical element to the reveal and it should spark off some arguments.

This game has been around since the 16th century, though the stakes have admittedly lessened since then. Chances are you’ve taken all of the context you need from the title, but: present your contestants with a number of different objects and ask them to guess whether they A. float, or B. do not float. It should be a simple round, but there’s some trickery you can employ to make sure it isn’t. A screwed up ball of tin foil does not float, but fashion it into a little boat and… ta-da! Apples float, potatoes do not. A pencil floats, and a comb does not. It’s hours of fun, a great round, and has the added benefit of making your contestants feel incredibly stupid.

You have two options: either test the objects beforehand (the cowardly method) or you can actually do a live demonstration through your camera. The latter will necessitate filling the bath/sink up with water and then positioning your computer on a stool or chair, near the large body of water. It really adds an element of danger to proceedings. Quick question: do laptops float?

On our timelines and in the popular imagination, the stars of viral internet memes are frozen in time. But did you know that these men, women and children age just like everyone else? It’s true! The Success Kid is now a Success Man, and Charlie is no longer biting fingers (you would have thought).

There are hundreds of articles across the internet dedicated to tracking down these former viral stars, and it makes for a challenging ‘Who’s That Meme?’ round. Just post a up-to-date picture of the person in question and ask people to guess. We recommend the New Statesman’s ‘Living the Meme’ series for photos. Check it out here

Raid your Twitter/YouTube likes and WhatsApp chats for viral videos and host them in your quiz, pressing pause at a pivotal moment. Then ask your participants to take a swing at what happens next in the video. Better yet, provide multiple choice options.

Piece of advice: make sure the videos aren’t too... grim. If the answer is ‘everyone perishes!’ then it’s probably a little too dark for a Wednesday night Zoom quiz tbqhwy. And stop watching those videos.

Simple, but deadly. Each question has binary answers (yes/no, before/after etc) as well as the option to pass. Your contestants can pass as many questions as they like, or pick between the two multiple choice answers, but here’s the catch: if they get one wrong, they get zero for the entire round.

You’d think they would only answer on the questions they know for certain, but as Chris Tarrant knows only too well, people simply can’t resist a 50:50. Make sure the questions are familiar enough that people will be tempted to take a shot, but difficult enough that it could easily bring their kingdom crashing down. WA-WA-WA-WA-WA-WIIIIIIIPEOOOUUUUTTTTT.

This one is very simple and very, very funny. Use the extremely impressive face-swapping website Reflect Tech to combine a friend’s face with a politician’s, and then ask players to guess which head of state/disgraced back-bencher has been given the morph treatment.

The only difficulty of this round is judging your contestants’ historical knowledge and adjusting your questions accordingly. Winston Churchill is far too easy, but a face-swap with Bill Rodgers, the Secretary of State for Transport (1976–1979), is far too hard, so you’ve got to find a fair middle ground that provides a challenge without wandering into wonk territory.

It doesn’t need to be contained to politics, of course. You could opt for famous figures in artwork, or sportspeople, or celebrities. Anyone, really. The site very occasionally has trouble with eyes and teeth, so opt for another picture if that’s the case.

The Mandela Effect is a strange phenomenon in which swathes of people across the world share the same false memory. It was named after the common belief that Nelson Mandela died and had a televised funeral in the Eighties, despite the fact he actually passed away in 2013. Other examples include the widely held untruth that the Monopoly Man wears a monocle, and that US comedian Sinbad starred as a genie in a Nineties movie called Shazaam. As you can imagine, these instances are ripe for quiz treatment, and you can check out a big list of examples here.

What makes this round all the more gratifying is that players will inevitably contest every answer and then be forced to issue a grovelling apology.

The Turkish film Industry (Yeşilçam) has a proud history of completely ripping off Hollywood blockbusters and spending less than a tenner in the process. From Superman to the Wizard of Oz, there’s a low-quality, frequently hilarious homage available to watch on YouTube. Play clips in your quiz and let your friends take a stab at what box office hit is having its intellectual copyright flagrantly violated.

Music rounds – as long as every member of your quiz party has steady WiFi and functioning speakers – are a lot of fun. Of course, you could opt for the tried-and-tested intros approach (stressful, requires you to press pause at just the right time like a schmuck), but we’ve got a better suggestion: recorder covers.

YouTube is awash with terrible and hilarious covers of classic songs played on the most maligned member of the woodwind family, the recorder, and they’re perfect fodder for ‘name that song’ rounds. Just when you think you might have it, the musician will accidentally emit a screeching note that bamboozles your brain. Start with this one and browse from there.

Delve through your friends’ Facebook and Twitter feeds to screenshot their most embarrassing and/or mystifying statuses and ask people to guess who wrote them. They should be far enough in the past – 2007 is a good vintage – that even the perpetrator themselves will have forgotten or buried it deep in their subconscious. (Nothing that could potentially get them cancelled, though, unless it’s just too funny to pass up).

Alternatively, you could focus in on the old, ill-considered tweets of celebrities – but then you’d have to to provide some kind of clue to help out your players. Or you could give them multiple choice answers. Or not. It’s your life.

McDonald’s regularly tests out new menu items in different countries. Some of them look good, some of them very much do not, and most of them feature an egg that has absolutely no reason being there. But the weird thing is, the cultural background of the dish doesn’t always correspond with where it’s being road-tested. That’s what makes the McDonald’s-around-the-world round so challenging.

Post a picture of a lesser-known McDonald’s dish from fryers past – Austria’s ‘McNoodles’ maybe, or Hong Kong's ‘Twisty Pasta Breakfast’ – and ask players to guess where it was sold. The more ill-conceived and doomed-looking the better, of course.

We’ll let you decide the correct answer. (The answer is no).

A chance to flex your creative muscles and destroy your brain in the process. Copy and paste some of Donald Trump’s lesser-known Twitter ramblings and then come up with a few of your own, making sure to study his language and cadence (a lot of exclamation marks, frequent ALL-CAPS, riddled with typos, @-ing the wrong person). If you get that right, this round is downright impossible.

When we’re watching TV (approximately 12 hours a day at this point) it’s easy to focus on characters and plot points and ultimately ignore the décor. Not only is that a great affront to hard-working set designers across the world, but it also presents the perfect opportunity for a can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-it quiz round.

It’s quite simple. Display a piece of scenery from a famous show and ask players to place it. You could opt for Don Draper’s conversation pit (easy), the offices of Succession’s Waystar Royco (moderately hard) or go way more niche. Check out some high-res options – from Mad Men to Breaking Bad to Buffy the Vampire Slayer – here.

Not only do celebrities have terrible tattoos just like you and me, but they’ve actually got a lot more of them. And get this: their bad taste was never held back by a lack of funds or the threat of being laughed at by their horrible mates. As such, they tend to keep them hidden as much as possible – which makes identifying the tattoo-haver in a Zoom quiz all the harder.

Download a celebrity image and crop into the tattoo, making sure to include anything too identifiable (their face; their name in block capitals etc) and you’re good to go. To help your contestants out, it might also be a good idea to include an anonymous quote from the celebrity explaining the reasoning behind their ink, which can often be more embarrassing than the tattoo itself.