How to run a pub quiz picture round

The picture round is the one round where the quiet table has a chance. Nobody has to buzz in, nobody has to shout across the bar, and a team that knows nothing about the FA Cup can still spot a blurred logo. It is the round that keeps a mixed room in the game.

It also buys you time. Teams work on the pictures while you run the rest of the quiz, so the round costs you almost no stage time. You hand it out early, you take it back at the interval, and the whole thing sits neatly in the gap where people are ordering another round anyway.

The catch is preparation. A spoken round can be written on the bus. A picture round needs images you are allowed to use, a way to show them, and a marking plan that does not eat your interval. This guide covers all three, and it is honest about what software does for you and what you still have to do yourself.

Everything below assumes a normal pub: one big screen or a projector, a mixed crowd of four to a dozen teams, and a host who wants to get home before midnight.

Most weak picture rounds fail the same way. The host collects twenty images that seemed clever on a Sunday afternoon, prints them, and finds out at half past nine that four of them are impossible and the rest are trivially easy. A theme fixes this, because a theme forces you to compare each image against the others in the same set.

Aim for a curve. The first two images should be gettable by everyone in the room, so every team writes something down and stays interested. The middle six or ten should split the room. The last two are for the table that takes this far too seriously. If every image is hard, teams give up and start talking about work.

Match the theme to who actually drinks in your pub. A round of nineties cartoon characters lands differently in a student bar than in a village local on a Sunday. If your regulars span forty years, split the round: five images the older half will get, five for the younger half, and ten that anyone could work out.

Close-up crops of everyday objects

Cartoon characters with the colour removed

Album covers with the text erased

Local landmarks from an unusual angle

Flags with one colour changed

Celebrities as children

Film stills with the actors removed

Beer and crisp packets stripped of branding

Road signs from around the world

Blurred logos

Close-up crops of everyday objects. Photograph a corkscrew, a dart flight, a bottle opener or a pump clip from two inches away. This is the easiest round to make because everything you need is behind your own bar, and it is the one round teams cannot look up on a phone.

Cartoon characters with the colour removed. Strip a character back to a black and white outline and most of the recognition goes with it. Teams argue for ten minutes over a shape they have known since they were six. Keep the outlines clean and large, because a grey silhouette on a pub TV loses detail fast.

Album covers with the text erased. Take the band name and album title out and you are left with the artwork alone. This round rewards the music fans without punishing everyone else, because a lot of famous covers are famous images first. Use covers you hold rights to, or make your own plain recreation of the layout.

Local landmarks from an unusual angle. Walk around your town with a phone and shoot the war memorial from below, the church door from across the road, the bus station roof. This is the round regulars talk about the next week, and every image is yours, so the rights question disappears.

Flags with one colour changed. Swap the red for green on a flag everyone knows and half the room still names the wrong country. Say clearly that you want the country the flag belongs to, not a description of the change, or you will get twenty sheets of arguments at marking time.

Celebrities as children. Old school photographs of famous people are a reliable crowd pleaser, and the reveal gets a genuine reaction. Stick to well known public figures, use images you are licensed to use, and never put a private individual on the screen.

Film stills with the actors removed. An empty room from a famous film is a much harder puzzle than it sounds, and the moment a team gets it the whole table shouts at once. Choose scenes with a distinctive set rather than a plain corridor, and use stills you have the right to show.

Beer and crisp packets stripped of branding. Photograph the packet, then blank the name and leave the colours and the shape. Your regulars know these products better than they know their own phone numbers, and it is a round you can shoot in ten minutes from your own stock.

Road signs from around the world. A warning sign for moose, camels or falling rocks tells you a lot about where you are. This round travels well because the answer is a country rather than a name, so spelling arguments almost never happen.

Blurred logos. Take a well known brand mark and blur it until only the shape and the colours survive. Test each one on a member of staff first, because the right amount of blur is a very narrow band. Build your own blurred version from artwork you are permitted to use.

The printed sheet is the traditional answer and it still works. Teams pass it round the table, cross things out, and hand it back at the interval. You need a printer, a page layout with clear numbers, and enough copies for every table plus two spares. The cost is paper, ink and the twenty minutes it takes to lay the page out.

The screen is the other route. You put the images on the pub TV or the projector, one at a time or as a grid, and teams answer from where they sit. Nothing to print, nothing to run out of, and the images stay sharp instead of turning into grey mush on a home printer.

The screen has one real limit: everyone has to be able to see it. Walk the room before you commit. If two tables are behind a pillar or facing the wrong way, either move them or print the round instead. A picture round that half the pub cannot read is worse than no picture round.

Be straight about this one. Photographs, artwork and logos belong to somebody. Saving an image off a search results page and putting it on a screen in a commercial venue is not automatically fine, and no quiz software changes that. The safe options are your own photographs, images you have bought or licensed, and images published under a licence that covers what you want to do.

Your own camera is the best source you have. Objects from behind the bar, streets around the corner, the sign outside the chip shop, the pattern on the carpet. These cost nothing, cannot be searched for, and are yours to use. A pub that builds a library of its own photographs over a few months never runs short of picture rounds.

Quizado does not supply picture round images. The app gives you a place to put an image question and a screen to show it on. Sourcing the pictures and holding the right to use them is your job as the host. If you are unsure about a specific image, leave it out and shoot your own replacement.

Quizado supports image questions, so a picture round can live inside the same quiz as your spoken rounds. You upload your own image, write the answer, and the image goes up on the venue screen through the external display window. Teams read it from wherever they are sitting and answer on their phones. Media questions with images, audio or video are on the Trivia Pro plan and up.

Players join by scanning a QR code in a phone browser. There is no app to install and no account to make, which matters when a table of six wants to play and one of them has an old phone. Scores update on the big screen as the answers land, so you are not adding up columns on a beer mat at the end of the night.

One thing Quizado does not do is print. There is no printable answer sheet feature. Answers are typed on the phone, one image at a time, and the app records them against the team. If you want paper, you still make the sheet yourself in a word processor and run the picture round the old way alongside the app.

The host device and the player phones both need an internet connection. There is no offline mode, so check the signal in the corner of the lounge before you build a whole night around it. Start free with the built-in packs and up to sixteen players. Writing your own question sets, and image questions, start on Trivia Pro.

Decide the spelling rule before the quiz starts and say it out loud. The usual rule is that a recognisable attempt counts, and it keeps the peace. Whatever you choose, apply it to every sheet, including the sheet belonging to the table of regulars who have been coming for nine years.

One point per image is enough. Half points are a trap: they double your marking time and produce three way ties. If you want a tie break, add a single bonus image at the end that nobody is expected to get, and give the point to the nearest guess.

Read the answers out with the picture on the screen. The reveal is half the fun of the round, and it is the moment the room finds out that the thing they argued about for twenty minutes was a cheese grater. Keep the pace up, one image every ten seconds, and get straight into the second half.