How to Run a Wedding Pub Quiz

Marek

Founder

Our wedding reception was in a pub, so choosing a pub quiz wasn't exactly a bold creative decision. But it turns out a proper British pub quiz doesn't transplant into a wedding cleanly - some of it works beautifully, and some of it falls apart the moment the buffet opens. Here's the whole format, with questions, so you can run one yourself.

What a pub quiz actually is, and which bits survive

Strip a Tuesday-night quiz down and you get: six-ish themed rounds of eight to ten questions, a quizmaster with a microphone and a running joke about the raffle, paper answer sheets one per team, a picture round handed out early to chip away at, a music round, a break in the middle, teams swapping sheets to mark each other's, and a tie-breaker held back in case of a dead heat.

Three of those break at a wedding.

The quizmaster on a microphone. In a pub, thirty people are already facing the same direction and have agreed to be quizzed. At a reception, half your guests are queuing at the bar and a chunk of them met each other an hour ago. Reading questions aloud means either interrupting everyone or being ignored by most of them. If you're having a formal sit-down dinner where the room's attention is already pointed at the top table, a live quizmaster is genuinely lovely. If people are mingling, it's a losing battle.

Peer marking. Swapping sheets with the next table works because everyone starts and finishes together. Weddings don't work like that. Guests arrive late, disappear for photos, get cornered by an aunt. Someone always ends up with three unmarked sheets and a biro.

The half-time break. You don't need one. You have speeches.

What does survive: themed rounds, the picture round, the music round, the tie-breaker, and the honest pleasure of a physical answer sheet on a table with a pen next to it. Keep those.

The shape of the evening

Six rounds, roughly forty minutes apart, with gaps carved out for the ceremony bits nobody should be quizzing through. Points go up as the night goes on so the losing team is never mathematically finished - we had more people on Team Groom than Team Bride at our wedding and Team Bride still won, which tells you the ramp works.

• Arrival - Round 1: Warm-up, 1 point a question
• Post-ceremony mingling - Round 2: Music, 2 points
• Dinner - Round 3: Picture round, 2 points
• Between courses - Round 4: Bride vs Groom, 3 points
• After the speeches - Round 5: Weddings Around the World, 5 points
• Dancing - Round 6: Lightning round, 10 points
• 11pm - Tie-breaker if needed, then prizes

If you want the reasoning behind the two-team split rather than table teams, I've written that up separately in Team Bride vs Team Groom.

Wedding pub quiz questions, with answers

These are all checked and none of them will go stale. Mix in your own couple questions - the general ones are the scaffolding, not the point.

Round 1: Warm-up

1. What does RSVP stand for? — Répondez s'il vous plaît
2. Complete the rhyme: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in her... — Shoe
3. Which wedding anniversary is traditionally marked with silver? — The 25th
4. And which one is ruby? — The 40th
5. Which queen wore the white satin dress at her 1840 wedding that made white bridalwear fashionable? — Queen Victoria
6. Which Scottish village became famous for runaway weddings after England's 1754 Marriage Act tightened the rules on marrying under 21? — Gretna Green

Round 2: Music

You don't need a PA. Write the questions down like any other round - most music rounds at weddings die because someone tries to play clips over a room that's already got music on.

7. The tune everyone calls "Here Comes the Bride" is the Bridal Chorus from which composer's opera Lohengrin? — Richard Wagner
8. The other one - the triumphant recessional - is Mendelssohn's Wedding March, written for a production of which Shakespeare play? — A Midsummer Night's Dream
9. Whitney Houston had the enormous hit, but who wrote "I Will Always Love You"? — Dolly Parton
10. Elvis recorded "Can't Help Falling in Love" for which 1961 film? — Blue Hawaii
11. ABBA gave "Dancing Queen" its first live outing at a gala on the eve of a royal wedding in 1976. Which country's king was getting married? — Sweden (Carl XVI Gustaf, to Silvia Sommerlath)

Round 3: Picture round

The one round where paper genuinely beats a screen. Print six images on a single A4 sheet, hand it out at the start of dinner, collect it when the plates go. Half film stills, half photos of you two - guests who don't know one will know the other, which is exactly the trade you want between the teams.

12. A still from the 1994 British comedy written by Richard Curtis, starring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell. Name the film. — Four Weddings and a Funeral
13. A still from the 2008 musical set on the fictional Greek island of Kalokairi. — Mamma Mia!
14. Four baby photos: which is the bride and which is the groom? (The other two should be your parents. It's meaner than it sounds.)
15. A photo of the venue taken from an angle nobody uses. Where in this building are you standing?

Round 4: Bride vs Groom

No answers from me here - this is the round that has to be yours. Write six, three favouring each side, so both teams get their easy ones and have to go hunting for the rest. Where did she go to university. What's his middle name. Which of them reversed a hire car into a bollard. The bartering between tables is the entire point.

Round 5: Weddings Around the World

16. In which country would guests smash crockery outside your house the night before the wedding, in a tradition called Polterabend? — Germany
17. The traditional French wedding cake is a caramel-bound tower of cream-filled choux buns. What's it called? — A croquembouche
18. In parts of Scotland, the bride or groom might be seized by friends, covered in treacle, soot and feathers and paraded through town. What's this called? — A blackening
19. In Italy, confetti aren't little bits of paper. What are they? — Sugared almonds

Round 6: Lightning round

Five questions, ten points each, sixty seconds. Pull them from whatever your crowd knows. The maths matters more than the content: at ten points a question, any team that's been quietly losing all night can still take it.

Tie-breakers

Nearest wins, no conferring. Hold these back and only use them if you actually need one.

20. How many steps are there to the belfry at the top of the Elizabeth Tower, where Big Ben hangs? — 334
21. How many miles long is the M25? — 117

If you want more like the world-customs round, there's a whole pile in our wedding customs trivia post.

The answer sheet

One A5 sheet per team, printed double-sided, in a pile by the entrance. Ours went next to the guest book with the QR codes, which is the right sort of place - somewhere people wander past rather than somewhere they're handed something.

Top of the sheet: a box for the team name, and a tick-box for Bride or Groom. Then six blocks, one per round, each headed with the round name and the points value, with numbered lines underneath. The picture round gets its own side. Bottom right, a small boxed grid for round scores and a total, so whoever's marking has somewhere obvious to write.

Two things worth printing on it: "no phones, pub quiz rules" and the time prizes are announced. We put both on a sign next to the code basket and it saved a lot of questions.

Quizmaster patter

If you do have someone on a microphone, brief them to be brief. A few lines that work:

"Right, Team Bride, you've got a maths teacher on your side. Team Groom, you've got the bar staff. I'd call that even."

"Question four. And I want to stress that this is a question about geography, not about anything the best man said earlier."

"Sheets in by the time the plates go, please. Anything handed to me after that gets marked generously and scored at zero."

"Pens down. If your phone is out, I will see it, and so will your mother-in-law."

Keep each round announcement under thirty seconds. The quizmaster is a metronome, not the entertainment.

So do you need an app at all?

Honestly? No. A paper pub quiz at a wedding works. If you've got one room, a sit-down dinner, and a friend who genuinely enjoys holding a microphone, paper is warmer than a screen and nobody's phone battery is involved. Older guests find it easier. It photographs better. Don't let me talk you out of it.

Three things go wrong at scale, though. Someone has to mark it, in a corner, with a pint going flat while everyone else dances. Someone has to be quizmaster all evening, which is a job, not a favour. And a paper quiz happens in one block, whereas the thing that actually worked for us was rounds trickling out across the evening, filling the gaps instead of becoming an event of its own.

That's the trade. Paper buys you charm and costs you a person's evening plus the ability to pace things. A phone-based quiz buys you automatic scoring and a schedule that runs itself, and costs you the tactile bit. We went digital because we wanted rounds spread from arrival to eleven, and roughly 85% of our guests played at least one without anyone ever announcing anything.

I built QuizYourGuests because we couldn't find anything that did the scheduled-rounds part properly. If you'd rather run it on paper, take the questions above and go - the format doesn't care.

Prizes and the finish

Small and silly beats expensive. A round of shots for the winning team, a bottle for the top individual scorer, and we gave a Lego set to the top player on each side. Our quiz master made the announcement at 11pm and that was that.

One last thing, and it's the one I'd actually fight about: whether it's the person marking the sheets or the person with the login, it should not be you. You're getting married. Somebody else can work out where the tie-breaker sheet went.

More on the practical side of this: How to Run a Wedding Quiz Without Annoying Your Guests has the full timeline and the question types to avoid.