On a hot and steamy Wednesday evening in July, Single in the City hosted the very first Trivia Night for Singles upstairs at Figaro Coffee House in Oakville. We met lots of interesting people, participants and venue staff, and everyone mixed and mingled according to plan. But not everything went smoothly or quite the way we expected.
Our first ever Trivia Night for Singles was a memorable experience to say the least. Spirited discussions happened throughout the evening and so we’d like to believe some real connections were forged and further conversation ensued afterwards. All participants absorbed a lot of ‘trivial’ information and our organization gained valuable experience testing a new format while searching for ways to do better next time.
Trivia nights promote healthy conversations which makes them good activities for people who are just meeting each other, sharing knowledge related to themselves and to the subjects in question. Trivia is a natural ice breaker and tackling diverse topics helps establish common interests. Participants often surprise themselves as they discover just how much they actually know, and what odd bits of information they’ve retained over the years. Even when they don’t know the answer right away, they’re usually presented with a bunch of equal possibilities by other players, their teammates, and they can be proud of themselves when they help select the correct option. Such interactions are satisfying, and participants soon find they can relax and enjoy themselves without worrying about their appearance, or the quality of their own discourse while bridging uncomfortable silences. The shared goal of answering tough questions shifts the focus away from the potentially awkward task of initiating personal conversation. And, most significantly we’ve conceived and are testing a quirky regime in which players are shifted about in a gregarious competition that’s quite unlike anything they’ve ever experienced before.
While other Trivia Nights are designed to promote team building, our procedure rewards individual prowess. We intended to give grand prizes to the top male and female performers, but ended up bequeathing them to the top scoring players who were both female. The high scores were 11.5 and 11 (out of 25) reflect the difficulty as that’s less than half of the points available. That was another thing we learned – the questions were too hard.
Do you remember NTN Bar Trivia? ‘Buzztime Trivia’ was a popular game in Firkin pubs twenty years ago, and our Trivia Nights for Singles borrows heavily from its presentation style and question format. Additionally, we’ve added and have now tested a musical chairs component. A spinning color wheel in our power point shuffles players around the room, forcing them to constantly form new teams. A random colour is selected along with a direction, clockwise or counter-clockwise, and so, one table at a time, everyone gets a chance to meet and work together for a while, before the spinning wheel forces another move.
Participants were grouped into new teams every two questions which we learned is too short a period. The idea was for everyone to meet and conspire, and so we injected twelve different ‘colour shifts’ in a twenty four question lineup. What we discovered is that the period between shuffling has to be at least three questions in order to give participants more time to have meaningful exchanges. There was too much movement and twenty four questions was too short a duration. Also, there were too many unnecessary videos accompanying the questions, and we collected and scored the sheets too often. We scored them twice before the final two rounds when once would have been enough. So yes, some lessons were learned.
Trivia Night for Singles is a friendly competition which helps break down social barriers, allowing participants to bond in mutually shared effort to win the evening’s grand prize. Players discover shared interests with others, providing more conversational material for later talks. The questions can cover a wide range of topics, catering to diverse interests. Engaging in cerebral activity stimulates participants’ minds, making this event more communicative, entertaining, and intellectually rewarding.
Single in the City’s Trivia Night for Singles’ game format is designed to present a non-threatening environment in which individuals can relax and gradually warm up to each other. As the four players at each table work together and share answers, they make connections which can lead to more meaningful conversations after the game ends. The camaraderie built during the game will hopefully extend beyond the event and provide a solid foundation for further interactions.
One of the big takeaways, as mentioned earlier, is that the questions were too hard. There’s an art to selecting the right queries because they have to be relatable challenges which pique discussions. We know a question is good when half of the participants answer it correctly. A great question inspires heated debates and has only a quarter of the audience answering it correctly. Asking, ‘which country would you be visiting if you found yourself in Timbuktu?’ is a good question because it causes everyone to search their memory banks and retrieve what they know about Africa. By contrast, asking the name of the fastest racehorse who ever lived – the 1973 Triple Crown winner (Secretariat), and obscure Simpson’s trivia is not as satisfying to the majority of attendees. Nobody knew the correct answer to the question below. Do you?
In the aftermath of our first Trivia Night for Singles event, I found myself scrutinizing the answer sheets, trying to remember the seating layout and who sat where at any given time. Replaying the game in my mind, I slowly became aware that not all the team members shared the correct info with their partners, and that’s fascinating. Perhaps there was a disagreement at the table? Or, some players were crafty and kept secrets? Knowing the right answer is empowering and not sharing that data is oddly conniving and wonderfully facetious. Could you imagine keeping correct info to yourself in such a situation? My own natural inclination is to shout aloud any correct answers I know, so others think I’m smart, and so to keep such knowledge to yourself is really curious and wonderfully compelling. I’m filled with admiration for the winners.
Figaro Coffee House was a wonderful host and deserves some acknowledgement. Their coffee is excellent because they’ve made it a point of pride and one of their value propositions in Oakville’s competitive marketplace. Figaro achieves their high quality beverages by roasting Arabica coffee beans from different origins around the world, and by providing a variety of high quality Canadian teas plus other cuisine.
Figaro is a Canadian company which was founded as a direct result of Michael’s (the owner’s) personal passion for strong coffee, fine wine and delicious baked goods. A convenient way to get Figaro’s fresh roasted coffee delivered straight to your door, and to ensure you never run out of your favourite beans, is to arrange for these goods to be delivered to your home with a Figaro coffee subscription. The coffee beans are roasted in Ottawa before being distributed to subscribers across southern Ontario. Check the link above for more details.
Special thanks to those players who attended our first ever Trivia Night for Singles and please come back and do it again. You will discover firsthand how much we’ve improved the experience, making all the changes listed above while selecting better, more contemporary questions. See you there.
