Guide

Christmas quiz for work

The office Christmas quiz has one job: get people who normally only speak in meetings laughing at the same table. It is not a test of who knows the most. Plan it around the room you actually have, which is part keen, part reluctant, and increasingly split between the office and people's kitchens.

Decide who is in the room, and where

Before a single question, work out whether everyone will be together, everyone will be remote, or it will be a mix. That decision shapes everything else. A room of forty people can mark paper sheets; a team spread across three sites cannot.

For remote or hybrid quizzes, put the questions on a shared screen and let people answer on their phones, so a colleague dialling in from home plays exactly the same game as someone in the meeting room. Nobody should be reading answers out over a laggy call while the office waits.

Mix the teams on purpose

Left to themselves, departments sit together and the quiz becomes Finance against Sales. That is the opposite of the point. Draw teams from a hat, or seat people by the colour of a sticker on their name badge, and aim for teams of four to six with a mix of departments and seniority.

Give teams a few minutes to choose a name before the first round. It is the quickest ice-breaker there is, and it tells you straight away which team is going to be loud. If people get stuck, there is a list of funny quiz team names to borrow from.

Keep it inclusive and work-appropriate

A work quiz is still a work event. Leave out anything that makes fun of colleagues, anything political, and anything that assumes everyone drinks, celebrates Christmas in the same way, or grew up in the same country. General knowledge, music, film and the year gone by all work well for a mixed room.

Pitch it easier than a pub quiz. Plenty of people at an office party have never done a quiz, and the aim is for every team to get most answers right. The competition still works: the gap between first and last comes down to a handful of questions.

A round plan that fits a lunch hour

If the quiz is at lunchtime or at the start of the party, forty-five minutes is plenty. Four rounds of ten is a comfortable shape:

1. An easy Christmas round to settle everyone in.
2. A music round: festive songs get the room singing.
3. A general knowledge round with nothing seasonal about it.
4. A round about your own company or the year, written by someone who knows it well: the best round of the day, if you keep it kind.

For an evening do, add a fifth round and a short break for drinks. Put the scores up between rounds; watching the table standings change is half the fun.

Prizes

Small and slightly silly beats expensive. A tin of chocolates for the winners, a trophy that gets passed on next year, and a booby prize for last place. The booby prize matters most: it turns the bottom team's evening into a story instead of an embarrassment.

Where to get the questions

There is a free Christmas quiz round with answers, plus general knowledge, 80s music and TV rounds to build the rest of the quiz from. Each can be printed, downloaded as a PDF or Word file, or read straight from a phone. For more on pitching and pacing a festive quiz, see how to run a Christmas quiz.