Trivia maker: how to make a trivia game people play again tomorrow

Any trivia maker will give you ten questions in a few minutes. What it won’t give you is a reason to play to the end, or a reason to come back tomorrow. Those come from decisions the tool leaves to you: how long a round runs, where the hard questions sit, how tempting the wrong answers are, what the score rewards and when the next round appears.

This guide is about those decisions. It is for editors and audience leads, loyalty and CRM managers, marketers and app product teams who want to make a trivia game that people finish. If your main worry is whether the answers are correct, start with our guide to checking an AI-written quiz. This one assumes the facts are right and asks whether the game is any good.

Why trivia earns its place

Trivia asks for something a page of text doesn’t: an answer. That small effort seems to feel good as well as being useful. In a semester-long classroom study published in the journal Memory this year, answering questions beat restudying for material that came up again, and it went with a greater sense of mastery and motivation and less anxiety.

Trivia can also send people onward. The founders of a news quiz tool told the Reynolds Journalism Institute that, compared with crosswords and word puzzles, news quizzes are where readers most often click through to related articles. That is one vendor’s observation rather than a study, but it fits the format: a question you just got wrong is a good reason to read more.

Keep the claims modest, though. The classroom study found no overall gain on related questions that hadn’t been repeated. And in two online experiments reported in Frontiers in Psychology in January, people who practiced recall did no better on a later test than people who restudied (the authors point to the limits of online research rather than to the idea itself). A three-minute game is a good way to hold attention. Don’t promise anyone it will teach them something until you’ve measured it.

The trivia maker writes the questions. You still have to design the game.

Decide what the round is for

One goal per round. The goal changes the topic, the length and what appears on the last screen, so choose it before you write anything:

• A daily habit. Short, the same shape every day, and a broad topic that anyone can try. The last screen shows the score and when the next round arrives.
• More reading. Questions drawn from recent stories, each with a link to the story behind it. The last screen offers two or three of those links.
• Knowing the product. For brands and loyalty apps: your range, your stores, your destinations. Keep it about things people enjoy knowing, not your sales pitch. The last screen leads to the page or the offer.
• A moment in the calendar. A round for a final, a holiday or a launch. It can be a little longer and sillier, because people play it once.
• Revision. For a class, the terms and ideas of one unit, with no prize and no pressure.

Set the length and the difficulty curve

Start with eight questions and about three minutes. That is short enough for a coffee queue and long enough for a score to mean something. Go longer only for one-off rounds. Then think of the order as a shape, not a list. Here is a shape that works for most topics:

1. The welcome. Nearly everyone gets it right. This one exists so nobody quits at question one.
2. Two familiar questions. Fans get them instantly, and casual players can reason their way there.
3. Two middle questions. They need some knowledge, or a good guess between two options.
4. The surprise. An answer that makes people say “really?”. This is the question they repeat to someone else.
5. A hard one. Only the keen players know it for sure.
6. The closer. Hard but fair, so that getting it feels earned and missing it feels like “I should have known”.

How hard should the whole round be? There is a useful hint from a different field. A 2019 paper in Nature Communications showed that some simple learning systems (artificial neural networks and a model of animal learning) improved fastest when they got about 85% of two-choice tasks right. Its authors say the result still needs extending to tasks with more choices, and it says nothing direct about people playing a quiz. Take it as a rule of thumb: our suggestion is to aim for a typical player missing one or two questions out of eight. A perfect score every day gets dull, and a round of misses feels like a test.

The person writing the round knows the subject, so everything feels easy to them. Whatever you think is a medium question is probably hard for your audience.

Write questions people enjoy getting wrong

In trivia the wrong answers do half the work. “Which country grows the most coffee?” is a dead question with the options Brazil, Iceland, Greenland and Antarctica. With Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia and Ethiopia, people stop and think. A few habits keep a round in that second category:

• Same kind, same length. All four options should be the same type of thing and about the same length. The longest, most careful option is often the giveaway.
• One line on a phone. Short questions are fairer, especially when points depend on speed. Slow readers and small screens shouldn’t lose to the clock.
• No trick wording. Avoid “which of these is not”. Players should feel beaten by the answer, never by the sentence.
• Say why. Where your format allows it, follow each answer with one line of explanation or a link. Being wrong and learning something feels very different from just being wrong.

Then decide what the score rewards. Extra points for speed add tension and spread out the scores, which makes a leaderboard worth reading. They suit a daily round among regulars. For a class, or for an older audience that takes its time, consider a more relaxed clock.

Turn one round into a daily habit

A single round is a campaign. A round every day at the same time, in the same place, is a habit, and it needs only a few things:

1. A fixed spot. The same place on your home page, in the app or in the newsletter. People shouldn’t have to look for it.
2. One shared round. When everyone plays the same questions, results can be compared, which is what makes people mention it to each other.
3. A streak. A count of the days in a row gives a small reason to return, and missing a day feels like a small loss. See how streaks and leaderboards work.
4. A theme for the week. Monday’s sport, Friday’s film and so on. Themes make a month of writing easier.
5. Someone who owns it. A daily game that quietly stops teaches people not to rely on you. Write ahead, and name the person who checks each week.

Rewards don’t need to be large. The Conversation told the Reynolds Journalism Institute it saw a good response when it offered stickers to the first ten people who emailed a screenshot of a finished quiz. The same piece says WBUR can sometimes sell sponsored questions in its weekly news quiz for $2,500 a week, so a regular round can also become something a sponsor wants.

What to measure

• Start rate. Of the people who saw the game, how many began? A low number points to placement or the cover, not the questions.
• Finish rate. Of those who began, how many reached the end? If it falls, the round is too long or too hard.
• Where people leave. A drop at one question points to that question.
• Return rate. How many players come back within seven days? For a daily game, this is the number that matters most.
• The next click. How many go on to the article, the offer or the next game from the last screen?

Compare your numbers with your own past rounds rather than with figures from elsewhere, and change one thing at a time: the length one week, the order the next.

Mistakes to avoid

• Writing for the experts. They are the loudest players, not the whole audience.
• Saving the fun for the end. If question one is hard, most people never see your best one.
• Selling in every question. Players notice, and they stop.
• Stopping after the launch. A habit takes time to form, so give the game a few weeks before you judge it.

Making trivia with Playgent

In Playgent Studio you describe the round in a chat, and Playgent Forge, our proprietary agent optimized for building puzzles and games, writes the questions from a topic or a link and can fill a week of days at once. Our Trivia game is eight quick questions on one topic, with more points for faster answers, and Facts is a shorter true-or-false format. Like any AI, Forge can make mistakes, so play each round before you publish it.

Streaks and sharing work on every plan, and daily leaderboards (ranked by highest score, with only the first try counted) come with the Team plan. One snippet puts the game on your site or in your app, in your fonts and colors. Plans start at $19 a month after the trial.

Start the 7-day trial, or talk to the team about running daily trivia across your sites and apps.