Most pub quiz questions are divided into categories. These categories are usually very broad, like General Knowledge and Trivia, both of which give the Quiz Master a lot of scope for their pub quiz.
The categories then cascade down into sub-categories, and sub-sub categories, and even sub-sub-sub categories and more.
So for example you might have the category Sport: sub category Football: sub-sub category The World Cup: sub-sub-sub Categories could be: Winning Teams, Host Countries, etc,
These are the subject categories.
The other way to organise your pub quiz questions is by medium. The most popular are Visual (usually Picture questions, but can be film clips) or Audio (usually music but can be spoken, ie identifying famous people or events). As yet I know of no pub quiz questions relating to smell or touch or taste. Anyone know differently?
Other puzzle types are Dingbats, Ditloids and Rebuses.
Instead of being either/or questions – in other words you either know the answer or you don’t – these puzzles can be worked out, although of course they do pre-suppose some general knowledge. (Included in this would be questions like: Is 143 a Prime Number? – in this case you would have to know what a prime number is, and then do the simple maths).
Dingbats are usually word puzzles where a well known phrase, place, person, animal etc is hidden in the arrangement of the letters – for example: Doctor Do (Answer: Doctor Doolittle).
Have a go yourself with this one: don’t klat. (No I’m not going to give you the answer until next week’s post).
Ditloids are similar, but in this case the main words in a well known phrase or saying have been reduced to just initials so: 24 H in a D. (Hours in a Day). How about: The 7 C of the R? If you’re being especially mean you can abbreviate the whole phrase e.g. T7WOTW.
And where does ditloid come from? It’s a ditloid of course – 1 D in the L of ID, the 1962 novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn about life in a soviet labour camp.
Rebuses are puzzles where pictures or symbols are substituted for letters, words or phrases: as you can see, there’s more to pub quiz questions than meets the eye.
