PULTEVENT
Office Christmas quiz: 7 rounds for the work Christmas party
Ten to eight on the third floor. Someone has wound tinsel round the projector cable, Accounts have named their team after a pun nobody else gets, and the managing director wants to know if there's a tiebreak. There is. The first question is already on the wall, and every table is looking at a QR code instead of a pile of answer sheets and one blunt pencil.
★ Free for the first 3 days, no card required
I've hosted the work Christmas quiz more times than I can count, and the paper version always sags in the same spot: the marking. Twenty minutes of somebody squinting at handwriting while half the room drifts to the bar. When answers come in from phones, the score is up on the screen before the last note of the question music has faded.
What follows is the quiz I'd build for an office of thirty to two hundred people. Seven rounds, roughly seventy-five minutes with a break, and a finale where the whole room decorates one tree together. It all runs from a laptop browser. Guests scan the code and answer on their own phones with no app and no account, as long as those phones have internet.
Seven rounds for a work Christmas quiz, in the order I'd run them
1 Warm-up: Christmas general knowledge
Ten gentle questions answered on phones. Which reindeer has the red nose, what goes into a mince pie, whose speech goes out at three o'clock on Christmas Day. Nobody is trying hard yet, and that's fine.
How to run it. Put question one up while people are still finding chairs. The early scanners get a head start and start nagging their tables to hurry up.
Every phone is connected and every guest has seen how answering works before anything really counts.
2 The office round
Questions only this building can answer. Whose mug has lived in the sink since March, which meeting room is always booked and never used, how many people replied-all to the parking email.
How to run it. Gather material a week ahead from people who know everyone. Run each question past someone sensible. Laugh with colleagues, never at one person.
This is the round people repeat on Monday. Anyone can win general trivia; this one belongs to the room.
3 Name that Christmas song
A few seconds of audio per question, and phones pick the title from four options. Open with the obvious ones and slip a deep cut in near the end.
How to run it. Drag the clips into the question media while you build the round. Cut them to the intro, because the chorus gives the answer away.
The room will sing along whether you like it or not, and that noise is exactly what a Christmas quiz is for.
4 The board round
Super Smarts puts a grid of categories and point values on the big screen, the layout everyone knows from TV quiz shows. Teams take turns choosing a cell, and the harder questions sit lower down for more points.
How to run it. Hand the choosing to the captains and let the rest of each table shout advice. Hide one question about the boss in the bottom row.
After three rounds of everybody answering at once, the pace changes and the tactics start the kind of arguments you want.
5 Baby photos
Colleagues as toddlers, ideally in terrible knitwear. The photo goes up, phones make their guess, and then the reveal names the culprit.
How to run it. Ask for photos early and promise they'll only appear on the night. A few people will decline. Let them.
Picture rounds rescue the people who hate trivia. Anyone can look at a photo and have an opinion.
6 Christmas myths: true or false
Short statements about festive traditions, about half of them things everyone half-believes. Phones tap true or false and the answer lands a second later.
How to run it. Read each one aloud once, then stop talking. The pause while the table argues is the round.
It's quick and loud and it sits right before the finale, when you want the energy climbing.
7 Finale: Decorate the Tree
One big tree on the screen. Everyone touches the tree on their phone and their ornament flies up to join it, with a scoreboard counting on screen.
How to run it. Kill the overhead lights if you can and count the room in. There is one rule: get your ornaments on that tree.
Nobody needs to know anything, so the table that scored nothing all night plays as hard as the leaders. Then the tree is full and you go straight to the awards.
One QR code, all night
Guests scan once when they sit down. That single connection carries every round, the votes and the tree at the end, so nobody rescans between rounds.
Questions about your office
The quiz builder takes text, pictures, audio and video. An in-jokes round only works if it's about your people, so you write it yourself.
A scoreboard everyone trusts
Points go up by round on the big screen. Nobody has to wonder whether Finance marked their own sheet a little generously.
An awards moment to close
The ceremony screen hands every team something to cheer for before one of them lifts the cup.
How the night actually runs
You sit at a laptop with the host console open in the browser. A second window, the stage, goes out to the projector or TV over HDMI, and that's what the room sees: the question, the timer, the answers, the scores. The console stays on your screen, so the room never watches you hunting for the next round.
I split it in two. Rounds one to four, then a fifteen-minute break for food and the raffle, then rounds five to seven and the ceremony. Seventy-five minutes of quiz is plenty. Stretch it to two hours and the back tables stop pretending to care.
One small thing that saves a lot of shouting: a guest's place is held for ten minutes if their phone drops off. Someone who pockets the phone to go to the loo comes back to their team, not to a fresh scan.
Writing the office round without starting a feud
The in-jokes round is the best part of a work Christmas quiz and the easiest way to wreck one. My rule is simple. If the answer is a person, that person should find it funnier than anyone else does. Nothing about bodies, salaries, relationships or who got made redundant in spring.
Good material sits in shared things: the printer that jams on Fridays, the fire drill in the rain, the email with the wrong attachment that everyone saw. Ask the office manager, not the loudest person on the team. Then read the questions out loud to someone from HR before you commit to them.
The builder lets you drop in a photo of the offending printer, which is worth more than any clever wording.
Music while tables argue
Silence during the answer window feels like an exam. The platform has a DJ deck built in, two decks with a crossfader and EQ, so I keep something festive and low under the thinking time and bring it up during scoring. If there's a proper DJ at the party, hand the music back to them for the break and take it again for round five.
Keep the song round clips separate from the background playlist, or you'll give an answer away by accident. I've done it once. Only once.
Scores, awards and one cup
The team scoreboard adds up points round by round, so by the break every table knows where it stands. That tension is useful. It gives the second half a story.
At the end, the awards ceremony picks awards from how the evening actually went, and every team walks away with at least one. You can swap any title for your own before the show. One team still takes the cup, and that's the photo that ends up on the intranet.
What you need, and one honest limit
A laptop with a modern browser, a projector or big TV, an HDMI cable, and internet for the laptop. Guests' phones need internet too, from the venue Wi-Fi or mobile data. There's no offline mode, so if the party is in a basement bar, test the signal a week before and ask for the Wi-Fi password in writing.
About language: the host console is being localized into English, and guest screens follow each guest's phone language. The ready-made quiz decks are mostly in Russian today, so for a British or American office you'll write your Christmas rounds in the quiz builder. For a quiz about your own office you'd be doing that anyway.
There's a free 3-day demo with no card needed. After that it's a one-time license, no subscription; see current pricing at https://pultevent.ru/en/. Start the demo here: https://pultevent.ru/login.html?mode=register&next=/app/
About the author
PULTEVENT was built by Ruslan Barashkin, who has hosted events since 2014: more than 500 weddings, office parties and birthdays. TOP 100 Awards named him best host in Moscow in 2024 and in Saint Petersburg in 2023, and he still runs his own nights from this console. More at pultevent.ru/en.
How to run an office Christmas quiz on the big screen
- 1
Two weeks out, collect baby photos and office-round material from a couple of trusted team leads.
- 2
Build the seven rounds in the quiz builder, adding audio clips for the song round and photos where they help.
- 3
Set up teams by table or department and give each one a name before the night.
- 4
On the day, connect the laptop to the projector, open the stage window and check the room's Wi-Fi from a guest's phone.
- 5
Put the QR code on screen as people arrive and run the warm-up while they settle.
- 6
Play the rounds, break after round four, finish with Decorate the Tree and go straight into the awards.
FAQ
How many people can play the office Christmas quiz?
Do guests need to install anything?
Can we use our own questions?
How long should the quiz take?
What if some colleagues are working from home?
Can people play as teams rather than individually?
What does it cost?
See also
Run brighter events — with PULTEVENT
All audience interactions, a second screen and timing in one app. Guests join by QR — internet is needed for you and for them.
Start free