19 Fun and Creative Virtual Quiz Round Ideas

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Need to liven up your weekly virtual quiz with some fun or unusual rounds? It’s time to get creative!

Many of us have been using Zoom calls and other video chats to host online quizzes and games nights for friends and family. But are you starting to get a bit bored of general knowledge? I know I am!

Thankfully, I know a lot of creative people. My family members have been doing a brilliant job coming up with fun and unique round ideas for our weekly online quiz night. So I’ve stolen a bunch of their best ideas, and gathered up more from a few blogger pals, to put together this list of awesome round ideas for your next virtual quiz…

19 Virtual Quiz Round Ideas

1. Anagram Selfie Game

This idea came from my sister and brother-in-law. Basically, Cheryl sent an anagram of a household object to the family WhatsApp group. The players have to unscramble the anagram, then find that item in their house, take a selfie with it, and send the selfie to the WhatsApp group.

Cue all of us racing around the house and snapping the most ludicrous selfies with things like toilet roll. It was hilarious! When the clue was “elewh” (wheel), I fell off my desk chair in my haste to take a selfie with the wheel! My family all now have an arsenal of REALLY unattractive photos of me for future blackmail purposes! 

Scoring: the first person to send their selfie gets 3 points, second gets 2 points, and third gets 1. 

2. How well do you know each other?

Another idea stolen from my sister – this game is a take on the “Mr and Mrs” game. Basically, you get everyone to answer the same set of questions privately, then each quizzer has to guess what the other players’ answers were! Here’s how we did it:

My sister made us all send her the answers to 8 questions on WhatsApp. The questions are below in case you need some ideas, but they could be anything. 

Next, she simply asked each team a series of questions about one of the other players. For example, she might ask me to guess my dad’s favourite food. It was a really fun round, and involved a lot of teasing each other about our various favourites. My brother-in-law may never live down naming Captain America as his favourite superhero! 

1. What’s your favourite food?
2. What do you love most in the world?
3. If you could live anywhere, where would it be?
4. What’s your favourite colour?
5. What’s your favourite animal?
6. Favourite drink?
7. What’s your dream profession?
8. Who is your favourite superhero?

3. Acting Out News/Historic Events

If you’re feeling creative, I love this idea from my sister Jess. She spent the week before her quiz night getting various family members to dress up and act out major historic events. She recorded these in advance and sent the videos one at a time to the family WhatsApp group during the quiz. Then we had to guess what the event was. 

If you have kids you can exploit, even better! Jess bribed her poor 11-year-old son with cash to dress up in a nurse’s outfit and ask a question about Florence Nightingale. She also got my niece and nephew to act out the Rosa Parks bus incident, and dressed my 7-year-old niece as Frieda Khalo, complete with monobrow! Jess claims it was a good excuse to teach her kids about various feminist icons!

4. Emoji Pictionary

Recommended by: Sara, Our Kind of Crazy

A really fun game we all love to play during Couples Game Night is Emoji Pictionary. This game is played by guessing what the group of emoji pictures are trying to say. You can find the emoji clues online, or create your own.

Pick different themes for your game and switch it up after a few rounds. Each team tries to guess what each emoji clue means in the fastest amount of time. Have a list of 10 for each category and see who can complete each category the quickest. Emoji Pictionary is lots of fun to play, but it’s also fun trying to come up with your own clues to stump the other team too. 

5. Reverse Quiz

What’s a reverse quiz? It’s a quiz in which you give an answer, instead of a question. And let the participants pick the right question. So instead of asking when the Berlin wall fell, you’ll be saying: “1991”. And offer four questions, such as:

1. When did the Spice girls release the song Wannabe?
2. When did the Berlin wall fall?
3. What year did France win the FIFA World Cup?
4. When did Ukraine gain its independence?

Obviously, you don’t have to limit yourself to just dates. You could have simple answers such as blue, or a French phrase, with four questions of how do you say “phrase” in French. You could even leave the questions open instead of multiple choice, and let the participants fill in a question that matches the answer themselves!

6. Colours for Answers

This is a really simple idea for a quiz round – or even for a whole quiz. Make a quiz where all the answers are colours. Instead of writing their answers down, players have to hold up an object of the matching colour. The more unusual their object, the better. 

You could force people to get extra creative, by only allowing them to use each object once. So they’ll start getting more desperate looking for, say, a red object to hold up. And perhaps you could award bonus points for the funniest object. 

7. Hometown Round

If you need inspiration for a simple trivia round for your online quiz, why not do one all about your hometown? I recently wrote a 50-question Dorset quiz and challenged my family to see how many they could get. You could look up a few facts about your hometown and make a simple themed round to see how well your friends and family really know their local area! 

8. Porno or Nail Polish Game!

I played this game at a hen party once and it was very funny. You make a list mixed up of adult film titles, and nail polish names, and players have to guess which one it is. For example, “French Affair”. Is it a raunchy movie, or an innocent nail polish? I’ve linked to two ready-made games below:

• Nail Polish or Porn game from Plan the Hen
• Nail Polish Guessing Game from Bespoke-Bride.com

9. Over-Simplified Synopsis

For this game, you need to get a bit creative. Take ten popular movies or books and write a ridiculously over-simplified one-sentence synopsis for them, then players have to guess what you’re describing. Keep it as vague as possible – no character names or anything. 

For example: “one man’s years-long desire to kill a teenage boy comes to a head during a showdown at a school”. Comment if you can guess it!

10. Slogans for Brand Names

My dad once did a really fun quiz round for our family with brand-name slogans. Pick a category, such as drinks or chocolate bars, and read out the advertising slogans used by that brand. You might read out slogans like “what’s the worst that could happen?” and “it gives you wings”, and people have to name those brands.

11. International Day Themed Round

Theme your quiz round to the day of the year you’re playing on! Search ‘international day <insert date>’. Every day of the year is an “international day of” something! Have a bee-themed round on World Bee Day, make a ‘sweet treats’ themed round on International Doughnut Day! There are so many weird and interesting days that can be used as inspiration.

12. Green Screen “Where Am I?”

Put yourself in the picture using the Instagram Stories green screen effect, and have your players guess where in the world you are!

Gather some of your favourite holiday snaps – or download some photos of different places from the internet. Next, head to the Instagram app and click on IG Stories. Flip the camera to selfie mode, then swipe through the filter options until you find the green screen. Hit the “add media” button, then take a selfie next to the landmark or attraction. Save the image, repeat a few times, and you’ll have a collection of selfies from “around the world”!

READ MORE in my round-up of 25 awesome picture round ideas!

13. Guess the Chocolate from the Bar

Recommended by: James from TriviaQuizNight

In this candy-themed take on a trivia round, all you’ll need to do is buy a handful of chocolate bars, remove the wrappers (and hide them, of course!) and slice them in half.

Line them up near your webcam or phone camera so they’re clearly visible, before challenging your contestants to ‘guess the chocolate’. Make sure you’re using famous chocolates such as Snickers or Kitkat rather than a slab of nondescript Dairy Milk, to at least give your participants a chance.

14. Film Photoshop

This is a ‘Guess the Movie’ round – but with a twist. The person hosting the virtual quiz chooses iconic images from famous movies and substitutes their own face for the actor’s face. Quiz players have to guess what the movie is. Think Tim Robbins standing in the rain in the brilliant ‘Shawshank Redemption’ or Patrick Swayze on the beach with his surfboard in ‘Point Break’!

Another option is to use well-known movie posters, remove the text and substitute your own face for the face of one of the actors. For example, a running Ben Stiller in ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ or Uma Thurman in ‘Pulp Fiction’.

15. Song Chain Game

Recommended by: Valentini, My Shoes Abroad

This is a fun game that can be as tricky as you want it to be and requires no equipment whatsoever – just your memory.

How to Play: The players, one after the other, sing different songs. Each player’s song has to start from the last word(s) of the previous person’s song. You can use any part of any song – just match it quickly! If you can’t, you’re out! You just need to set a few rules first:

• Decide who will start singing first
• How many seconds the following person will have to find and sing the next song. 4-6 seconds are good for beginners. When you become a pro, you can drop it down to 2-3 seconds!
• How many words? Within how many words must the following person match the song? The more the easier! For example, if you have agreed on allowing any of the 5 last words and the singer stops at “Every night in my dreams I see you, I feeeel you” the next person must find a song lyric starting from any of the words “see”, “you”, “I”, or “feel”.
• Make it more challenging: when you sing, stop at the weirdest words!! Most people know songs with the words love, girl, boy, you, me, etc, somewhere in the lyrics, but how many can find songs with words such as “paradox” or “authority”?!

16. Airport Games

Recommended by: Alexx, Finding Alexx

One of the most challenging rounds I’ve ever tackled at a pub quiz was a travel round made up of those pesky three-letter airport codes and pictures of airline tail logos! Most travellers would recognise LAX, JFK, LHR and DXB, but what about MOM, DAD, HEL, BUM and BRR? That’s Moudjeria in Mauritania, Da Nang in Vietnam, Helsinki in Finland, Butler in the US, and Barra in Scotland, respectively.

My job at a travel agency definitely helped our team get a decent score, although I did have to pull rank and change an answer after a teammate insisted that Korean Air’s blue, red and white yin-yang-style logo was, in fact, Pepsi’s aeroplane!

READ MORE: 24 Ready-Made Travel Picture Quiz Rounds

17. TV Show Game

One way to put a unique spin on a pop culture or television and movie quiz is to create rounds of questions using three surnames. Each surname that you list should be that of a character from a well-known movie or television show. For example: Granger, Weasley and Malfoy. Players then have to name the television show or movie that corresponds to the surnames provided.

You can vary the difficulty by selecting more obscure characters or shows and movies. You can also make the selection easier by providing an answer bank or multiple choices. To add another degree of customisation, you can do rounds from different decades or genres of cinema.

18. Baby Pictures

This quiz round might not work if you’re playing with family members, but it’s perfect for groups of friends or co-workers. Before the quiz, get everyone to send you a photo of themselves as a child. Say under the age of 8 – or make it baby photos to make things really challenging. During the quiz, you just need to send out the photos to all the players so they can guess who’s who! 

19. Play a Song Backwards

If you fancy a music round for your quiz, why not make things interesting? Instead of playing a clip of a well-known song, you could use some tech to play the song clip backwards. Players then have to figure out what the song is. There’s a Reverse Music Player app on the Google Play store, and equivalent versions on Apple too.

My little brother did it when he was the host for our online family quiz. It’s pretty tricky, but if you pay attention, you can usually figure out the tune. Definitely a fun take on a music round!

Virtual Quiz Round Ideas: The Quick Version

1. Give an anagram of a common household object – players have to post a selfie with that object.
2. How well do you know each other – a spin on the “Mr and Mrs” game.
3. Act out historic events or news – players have to guess the event!
4. Emoji Pictionary
5. Reverse Quiz – give the answers and players have to guess the question.
6. Colours for answers – players have to hold up an object of the corresponding colour.
7. Theme a round all about your home town.
8. “Porno or Nail Polish”
9. Name the movie from an over-simplified synopsis
10. Give a brand name slogan and player shave to guess the brand
11. Look up what “international day of XYZ” it is when you quiz and theme a round on that.
12. Use a green screen to create a “where am I?” round!
13. Guess the chocolate from the bar (cut in half, no wrappers).
14. Film Photoshop – replace an actor’s face with your own in an iconic scene!
15. Song Chain Game – this one is complicated, check the rules above.
16. Guess the airport from its 3-letter code.
17. Guess the TV show or movie based on 3 surnames of characters.
18. Name the players from their baby photos.
19. Play a song backwards.

Got any more fun ideas for a virtual quiz round? Scroll down to share in the comments!