How to host a virtual Covid-19 Pub Quiz

With Covid-19 social distancing measures in place, people are coming up with innovative ways to socialise remotely, and one of those is to host your very own virtual pub quiz

With all the uncertainty right now, it has been heartwarming to see the ways in which communities and groups have come together in recent times to entertain themselves and cheer one another up. There have been sing along dance parties, Covideo parties, we even saw a virtual wine tasting! One fun way to pass the time is a virtual pub quiz. It’s easy to arrange, good clean fun and a great way to get us off our devices for a couple of hours.

Once you’re ready, check out our post with over 140 questions and answers for a virtual pub quiz.

Here are our top tips for organising your very own Covid-19 Pub Quiz:

1. First, assemble your teams. Send a text into a few of your WhatsApp groups seeing if anyone is interested in playing. Once you have a few teams involved, pick a date and a time and decide who is going to be Quiz Master.
2. The Quiz Master has the hardest part, as it’s their job to come up with the questions. Select a number of rounds (10 rounds of 5 questions will take you around an hour and a half to do). Give each round a theme, such as Current Affairs, History, Music, Film, etc. There can be picture rounds, eg ‘Name the film’ with 5 images of famous movie scenes. Or music rounds where you can read lines from well-known songs and get players to guess the artist. Get creative with it.
3. Set up a group message. Use WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram – whatever works for you. This will be the group where you confirm the time and date of the quiz, send picture rounds into, and send the rules.
4. Agree which way the game will be played. In our experience, you have two options. One, is to send out the questions round by round by text message (in the aforementioned group message), and give the players a set time to reply with their answers. The second, which is easier if you have a smaller group playing perhaps, is to invite everyone to a Zoom/Facetime/WhatsApp video call and read the questions aloud like a Quiz Master would. In both cases, each team answers by texting you directly at the end of each round. So, if you have a round called Film with 5 questions, have each team send their answers marked 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 clearly in one text message. It will make it easier to score. Have the answers and a score sheet nearby so you can quickly score each team as they send in their answers.
5. Get each team to choose a team name so you can draw up the score sheet and have some fun with it. Current affairs team names encouraged, such as Quaranteam and Quentin Quarantino.
6. A few minutes before the game is due to start, send the rules into the group message. Obviously, there’s to be no Googling as that ruins it for everyone. But also explain to people how the game will unfold. You can explain all this in person via video if you’re doing it that way.
7. Play away! Have fun with it and give yourself a few minutes after each round to count the scores up. Have regular breaks for people to get drinks or snacks. It might be easier (but not essential) if you have two people as Quiz Master – one can read the questions while the other keeps on top of the scores.
8. At the end, let people know the answers before revealing the winner. If you’re on video you can have fun watching everyone’s reactions to this part. Then, announce the winner and agree a time to do it all again next week!

A big thanks to Roz O’Shaughnessy for kicking off this craze for us by sharing her quiz with the Irish Country Magazine team!