Bar Trivia

Are you a bar, pub, or restaurant owner who is sick of paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year for trivia questions for your weekly trivia games? Are you looking for a way to play trivia at your own party or game night but hate the obvious, random, and out-of-date questions in trivia board games?

The Bar Trivia app is the solution. This low-cost trivia app designed for use in bar or tabletop play that contains 5,000+ high-quality, non-crowdsourced trivia questions organized into 41 categories. The functionality of this app is very simple. When you click on a category, like Art, for example, a random question and answer from within that subject will be pulled from our database of over 5,000 questions.

Our app is indeed simple, but we have taken great care in writing what we believe to be the highest-quality trivia questions available anywhere. Please allow us to describe our trivia philosophy:

The first issue to consider is difficulty. Obvious trivia questions are bad, as are impossibly difficult ones. The key is that the difficulty be just in the sweet spot between these two extremes. When you can't think of the answer after being asked the question, but do remember the answer after hearing it, this is a sign of a good trivia question.

Also, certain types of questions are almost always bad, and we have done our best to exclude these. Questions asking about the year in which any specific event occurred rarely capture anything of interest about the event in question. True or false questions are dull. Questions about world or state capitals are tedious and typically a sign of a lazy question writer.

Another crucial ingredient in a good trivia question is what we refer to as 'centrality'. Centrality is the level of familiarity the typical person would have with the subject of the trivia question. For example, the question "Who directed the 1973 Spanish film 'The Spirit of the Beehive'?" is a low-centrality question. Though it's a great film, most people have never seen it, so a question like this will only frustrate them. They don't have any way to even begin thinking about the answer.

A better, high-centrality question would be something like "The film 'Jurassic Park' takes place mostly on what island?" Almost everyone has seen Jurassic Park. Even if they can't remember the island's name, there is at least a way they can begin thinking about the question. "I think it was supposed to be somewhere in Central America," they might think. "Maybe it had a Spanish name. Oh wait, it was Isla Nublar!" This is what makes trivia fun.

We've also done our best to include questions that elucidate interesting and surprising events from history, literature, science, and the world of high culture generally. Though there's plenty of pop culture as well, we've tried not to ask too many questions about passing fads that no one is likely to care about within the space of a few years.

We hope you will enjoy playing trivia with our questions and saying goodbye to high-priced alternatives!