Finding the answer hiding in plain sight
Pub quizzes, GeoGuessr, crosswords, cryptics, or Excel eSport cases — I do love a good puzzle. The best ones reward you for noticing the thing everyone else walked past.
I run pub quizzes, and over time that turned into a small obsession with getting the format right. The version I host is a single-venue crawl: every team stays in one bar and plays seven rounds back-to-back, always finishing on a music finale. I built a whole library of rounds — themed bundles you can mix and match — along with the timetable and the scoring so a night runs itself once the clock starts.
Writing the questions is my favourite part. A good pub-quiz question isn't just trivia; it tells you a little story and leaves a trail of clues, so even a team that doesn't know the answer can reason their way close. The set below is from Waku Waku, my animal-themed edition — named after the old Dutch TV quiz where every right answer earned you a stuffed monkey.
Ten questions, picked from across the seven Waku Waku rounds. Read, have a guess, reveal the answer, and keep yourself honest with the score. No stuffed monkeys, sorry.
When I'm not writing my own, these are my daily fixes. The first is a little shortcut I set up that jumps straight to the latest NRC puzzle; the second is a single fiendish cryptic clue, fresh every day.