Hosting trivia quizzes at your bar or cafe can attract new loyal customers and grow your revenue. There are many undeniable benefits to hosting pub quizzes. The question is—how? Organizing a pub quiz from A to Z is a difficult task. Outsourcing the task to someone else might be too expensive. Doing it all yourself, from sourcing the questions to designing the ads, might be too big of a job. Besides, this type of event requires keeping up with trivia trends and knowing how to implement them.
An electronic trivia game or system can make your job a lot easier. It’s not as expensive as hiring a trivia company to run the quiz for you. It also gives you the freedom to run the event however you want. You’re free to do the marketing, pick the date, and even host the quiz yourself. The electronic trivia game of your choice will take care of the actual game. Keep reading to find out about some great options for bars!
Buzztime
Ranking: 5/5
Buzztime is an American company that offers restaurants and bars to organize trivia, card, and arcade games and tournaments for their customers. Buzztime has two different tiers.
The first tier is called Buzztime Streaming. The price starts at $50 per week or $199 per month. The offer includes a premium trivia schedule, high-resolution streaming, and a North American and local leaderboard. If you’ve chosen this tier, your customers will have to bring their own devices to play.
The second tier, Buzztime Elite, starts at $99 per week. Bars and restaurants with an elite membership get tablets for quizzes professionally installed, poker and arcade games, and live trivia and poker, in addition to everything from the Buzztime Streaming tier.
In essence, Buzztime offers to bring the games to your venue. With special Buzztime tablets, your customers will be able to participate in live trivia events and play games. Players can face opponents sitting across from them and living across the country. This creates an added level of entertainment that many bars lack.
Brainstormer Trivia
Ranking: 4/5
Brainstormer Trivia is a pub quiz company based in San Francisco that’s been on the market for more than 20 years. The company works with bars, pubs, restaurants, and businesses all over the US. If your venue is located in the Bay Area, you can invite the Brainstormer Trivia crew to host your trivia event. They can take care of the whole quiz, from questions to technology and professional hosting.
If you’re only looking for a quiz, you can opt for one of the self-hosted options on the Brainstomer Trivia website. A subscription quiz has instructions for hosting a trivia night, downloadable play card and score tracker templates, and printable PDF versions of the questions. Fans of digital solutions will enjoy the QR code that gives players the opportunity to play on their own devices online. If you have your own tablets, you can give them out to teams. Brainstormer Trivia also vouches to include your events in their schedule online, provided you’re a regular trivia-hosting venue.
As for the actual quiz, there are two options. A Classic Four Round Brainstormer Quiz will set you back anywhere from $44.95 to $64.95 per quiz per week, depending on how often you want to host quizzes. If you don’t plan to become a regular venue and only want to host one quiz at a time, the quiz will cost you $64.95. This option includes four rounds, with one round in each of these categories: pop quiz, general knowledge, theme topic (subject to change every week), and last call for know-it-alls, which includes a tiebreaker. Each category contains at least ten questions.
A Classic Six Round Brainstormer Quiz can cost from $64.95 to $84.95 per quiz per week. It costs $84.95 to run just one quiz without a weekly subscription. This option is just like the Four Round Quiz, but with two extra rounds. Those include the matching handout round, with 12-13 printout questions, where the players have to match the lyrics to the song, the author to the book, and so on. The second addition is the picture round, which involves hanging out pictures to the players and letting them guess what they’re looking at.
Though this trivia format is old-fashioned, Brainstormer Trivia tries to stay on top of trends by offering quizzes on mobile devices. Depending on who your audience is, they might appreciate it. Brainstormer Trivia favors regular customers over one-off purchase customers; the price clearly indicates that. However, if you only want to try one quiz or don’t want to commit to a weekly tariff, there are options for you too!
Catch the Mania
Ranking: 4/5
Catch the Mania is an old-school-style trivia game provider you can work with. In essence, the company sells presentations. One of their presentations is good for a two-hour-long trivia game. It includes multiple rounds of questions with audio and visual rounds. You only need a projector or monitor and some speakers to make it work. Of course, it is still up to you to advertise and host your event.
Much like other trivia systems on this list, this one has subscription options. On the website, you can get started right now for $400 and pay only $25 a week. If you’re only operating one location, you qualify for the Single Location Weekly License, which costs $50 per week. For $100 per week, you can get your hands on the Multiple Location Weekly License, allowing you to show a quiz at up to five locations.
For the prices stated above, Catch the Mania offers to send you a trivia game presentation along with an answer sheet. You’re also entitled to unlimited online support, promotional materials that will help you advertise the event, and support materials like score sheets and electronic scoreboards.
As this is not the most modern solution on this list, trivia players are expected to jot down their answers on a piece of paper. If you’re just starting out and looking for a fun way to attract new customers, this shouldn’t be a problem. Many places still resort to the pen-and-paper method.
DigiGames
Ranking: 3/5
DigiGames puts emphasis on the simple fact that the days of pen-and-paper quizzes are over. Nowadays, to wow your clientele, you need to invest in relevant technology in trivia games. DigiGames has a solution—a special Trivia Cubes bar trivia system.
Lovers of television game shows are familiar with buzzers. It’s true that buzzers can turn a trivia game into a game show experience. It’s amazing how much of a difference one simple tool can make. You can order up to 50 Trivia Cubes from DigiGames to give your customers an engaging trivia experience at your next event. One cube costs $60. The buzzers from DigiGames are wireless, so they will not interrupt the flow of the game. In addition to that, the company offers a lifetime of free software updates.
DigiGames focuses primarily on trivia accessories, but the company also provides software games and weekly trivia questions. For $5 a week, you can get 31 questions every week. $12 a week buys you 93 questions, and $20 is good for 186 questions every week. Though DigiGames products are designed primarily for North American consumers, people who live outside of the US can purchase questions too.
Alternative: Use a Software App
If you’re not particularly keen on giving your money to a trivia company in exchange for some questions, we’ve got another solution for you: use a software app to run your trivia night. Apps like Kahoot! only offer a platform for your questions, while VenueTrivia and TriviaHub Live have pre-made quizzes you can use. With handy apps like these, it’s up to you to decide how much of the quiz you want to outsource and how much you want to keep in your own hands. Everything is entirely customizable so that you won’t fall into the category of boring trivia games.
As for questions, if you don’t like the pre-made quizzes on these platforms, you can always source yours online. Find your favorite categories and grab a bunch of questions. You can input the correct answers in the software app of your choice. Then, all that’s left to do is host the game and keep the score.
Buying Guide
This guide covering electronic games for bars has a clear winner—Buzztime, specifically, Buzztime Elite. Buzztime Elite gives its members’ tablets that can be used to play games. It doesn’t only offer trivia, but also other games, such as poker and arcade games. Buzztime is an excellent solution for bar trivia because it’s modern and engaging. At the same time, many smaller bars and pubs might find $400 or more a month unaffordable. If you’re not sure about this system, you can always book a demo on the website.
Brainstormer Trivia is a slightly simpler and more affordable solution for pub quizzes. There is an option to play on mobile devices, which the younger generation will appreciate. If it’s within your budget, you can supply your own tablets for players. If not, then you can go with pen and paper. Another benefit of this option is that you can buy just one quiz to try it out.
Catch the Mania and DigiGames are less exciting. Catch the Mania is the most affordable option for a complete quiz, with one quiz retailing at as little as $25. That is, of course, only if you prepay for the service for a couple of weeks. DigiGames puts much emphasis on the game show element with hardware buzzers but skimps on the actual quiz. You can buy question packs from DigiGames, but the company’s software games don’t look very promising.
Finally, if you’re a fan of DIY and want to keep as much as possible in your own hands, try a software app! There are many free options, so trying won’t set you back a single cent. There are apps with pre-made quizzes and templates that you have to populate.
Final Words
Introducing even occasional trivia quizzes in your bar or pub can help you make more money overall. Choosing the optimal way to organize the game can contribute to its subsequent success. Marketing will help you bring in the clientele, and the actual quiz (and tasty food and drinks) will keep these people coming back. Choose wisely, and don’t be afraid to try different options before settling!
What do you think is the optimal way to host a trivia night at a bar? Would you use any one of these electronic games? Let us know what you think in the comments!
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