when i play i play to win
March 5, 2021 7:40 AM Subscribe
Help me host the most inventive family-friendly Zoom quiz ever - sibling rivalry edition
I have been doing a fortnightly "pub quiz" style session with my extended family via Zoom for nearly a year now. I take it in turns with my brother to write the quiz. To say we're competitive is the understatement of the year. Somehow though his quiz is ALWAYS better and I am SO TIRED OF IT and I WANT TO WIN GODAMNIT
But, my god, Metafilter. I am burned out trying to think of new and inventive quiz ideas. I'm also in the middle of moving house and job and I just don't have any emotional or creative bandwidth available to be inventive.
So - what's the best semi-interactive quiz you've done? Help me CRUSH this!
Things we've done (that I don't want to repeat, unless there's a new twist on them):
- played Scattergories: this works surprisingly well, doesn't require any prep, and is generally very funny. Funny is excellent.
- played Kahoot: not a huge success, the format seemed difficult to grasp for the older lot
- played a sort of 'cross the desert' race, like snakes and ladders with a deck of cards: no skill involved, which is also excellent
- geo-guesser lite: this was quite good but I'm out of semi-recognisable landmarks
- every possible iteration of the traditional round-based British pub quiz - open to doing this again, but I just can't bring myself to think up more questions!
I am more than happy to throw some money at this in return for glory. I have everyone's emails, phone numbers, and addresses. We have 1.5 - 2hrs to play in, and up to 10 players.
I have been doing a fortnightly "pub quiz" style session with my extended family via Zoom for nearly a year now. I take it in turns with my brother to write the quiz. To say we're competitive is the understatement of the year. Somehow though his quiz is ALWAYS better and I am SO TIRED OF IT and I WANT TO WIN GODAMNIT
But, my god, Metafilter. I am burned out trying to think of new and inventive quiz ideas. I'm also in the middle of moving house and job and I just don't have any emotional or creative bandwidth available to be inventive.
So - what's the best semi-interactive quiz you've done? Help me CRUSH this!
Things we've done (that I don't want to repeat, unless there's a new twist on them):
- played Scattergories: this works surprisingly well, doesn't require any prep, and is generally very funny. Funny is excellent.
- played Kahoot: not a huge success, the format seemed difficult to grasp for the older lot
- played a sort of 'cross the desert' race, like snakes and ladders with a deck of cards: no skill involved, which is also excellent
- geo-guesser lite: this was quite good but I'm out of semi-recognisable landmarks
- every possible iteration of the traditional round-based British pub quiz - open to doing this again, but I just can't bring myself to think up more questions!
I am more than happy to throw some money at this in return for glory. I have everyone's emails, phone numbers, and addresses. We have 1.5 - 2hrs to play in, and up to 10 players.
I've never played Taboo on-line (although it exists), but I played the regular version and it was a lots of fun.
tl;dr - Team A has to guess a particular word/phrase without using any of the Taboo words (so, they have to guess "Titanic" without saying "boat", "iceberg", "sink", "movie", or "ocean"). For the regular version there is a loud and annoying buzzer than you press when someone says a verboten word (then you get two minutes of arguing whether "iceberg" being forbidden means that "ice" is).
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 9:49 AM on March 5, 2021
tl;dr - Team A has to guess a particular word/phrase without using any of the Taboo words (so, they have to guess "Titanic" without saying "boat", "iceberg", "sink", "movie", or "ocean"). For the regular version there is a loud and annoying buzzer than you press when someone says a verboten word (then you get two minutes of arguing whether "iceberg" being forbidden means that "ice" is).
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 9:49 AM on March 5, 2021
Mad Gab would work really well over zoom. You just need to get each team a set of cards. There might be some that are downloadable online. The person whose turn it is, will read the card out loud and try to figure out what the actual saying is. The person who's holding the card can just hold it up to the camera. The holder sees the back of the card which has the answer.
(I've got a version that uses just words on the cards, unlike the version with some pictures that I linked above. I think having just words is easier.)
posted by hydra77 at 10:01 AM on March 5, 2021
(I've got a version that uses just words on the cards, unlike the version with some pictures that I linked above. I think having just words is easier.)
posted by hydra77 at 10:01 AM on March 5, 2021
Best answer: This game is SO MUCH FUN if your family are readers! I imagine it would adapt well to Zoom.
Description: Ex Libris is a game to challenge your literary acumen and test your creative writing skills. Each of the one hundred cards gives you the title, author and plot summary of a different novel or short story. At the start of a round, one player, taking turns as the reader, picks a card and reads it out. The other players then have to write a plausible opening or closing sentence to the work in an attempt to bluff fellow players into believing that their script is the genuine one.
posted by heavenknows at 10:04 AM on March 5, 2021 [2 favorites]
Description: Ex Libris is a game to challenge your literary acumen and test your creative writing skills. Each of the one hundred cards gives you the title, author and plot summary of a different novel or short story. At the start of a round, one player, taking turns as the reader, picks a card and reads it out. The other players then have to write a plausible opening or closing sentence to the work in an attempt to bluff fellow players into believing that their script is the genuine one.
posted by heavenknows at 10:04 AM on March 5, 2021 [2 favorites]
Guess the animal from its noise, can include fart noises if your family means that way. YouTube is good for hippo, beaver, camel, otter, rhino etc noises
posted by biffa at 10:30 AM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by biffa at 10:30 AM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
Set it up
Opening drinks party at the AGM of the International Federation of Ob&Gyn Consultants IFOC. Delegate from Cameroon catching up with his pal from Malawi.
"I say it's wumb!"
"No no my friend, you'll find it's womBa"
Earwigging British colleague turns round
"You chaps are both wrong, the correct pronunciation is woom, silent b"
"What does this fellow know? he's never even seen a hippopotamus in the wild, let alone heard it fart in a river"
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:05 AM on March 5, 2021
Opening drinks party at the AGM of the International Federation of Ob&Gyn Consultants IFOC. Delegate from Cameroon catching up with his pal from Malawi.
"I say it's wumb!"
"No no my friend, you'll find it's womBa"
Earwigging British colleague turns round
"You chaps are both wrong, the correct pronunciation is woom, silent b"
"What does this fellow know? he's never even seen a hippopotamus in the wild, let alone heard it fart in a river"
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:05 AM on March 5, 2021
Best answer: One Word, which is just an online version of Just One.
And there's also a great online version of Codenames.
posted by shesbookish at 11:33 AM on March 5, 2021
And there's also a great online version of Codenames.
posted by shesbookish at 11:33 AM on March 5, 2021
Response by poster: Thanks all! Some great ideas in here - I've best-answered those which I'll try!
In the course of my searching I found this Random Trivia Generator, which would itself work for doing Trivial Pursuit via Zoom (the party picks a question, and if they correctly, you then click through that card into loads more questions in that genre, which they answer until they get one wrong)
For anyone else using this question as a resource later, for the last quiz I ended up doing four rounds:
- A traditional pub quiz round using questions 'borrowed' from the Trivia Generator and grouped into themes that I made up to suit my audience (including "Famous Murders");
- A picture round, linking animals with their relevant collective nouns;
- A literature round that I like to call "Coke or No Coke", featuring famous novels released just before and just after Coca Cola was invented, and in which the audience have to decide whether the characters in those novels could canonically have been drinking Coke;
- A 'closest' round, with a series of unknowable answers ("How many TV licences were issued in the UK in 2019?") and tiered points for closest to worst answer.
posted by citands at 4:49 AM on March 17, 2021
In the course of my searching I found this Random Trivia Generator, which would itself work for doing Trivial Pursuit via Zoom (the party picks a question, and if they correctly, you then click through that card into loads more questions in that genre, which they answer until they get one wrong)
For anyone else using this question as a resource later, for the last quiz I ended up doing four rounds:
- A traditional pub quiz round using questions 'borrowed' from the Trivia Generator and grouped into themes that I made up to suit my audience (including "Famous Murders");
- A picture round, linking animals with their relevant collective nouns;
- A literature round that I like to call "Coke or No Coke", featuring famous novels released just before and just after Coca Cola was invented, and in which the audience have to decide whether the characters in those novels could canonically have been drinking Coke;
- A 'closest' round, with a series of unknowable answers ("How many TV licences were issued in the UK in 2019?") and tiered points for closest to worst answer.
posted by citands at 4:49 AM on March 17, 2021
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:55 AM on March 5, 2021 [3 favorites]