What an estimation question is for
A multiple-choice question has a winner and a loser: you knew it or you did not. An estimation question has a whole room of people who are all somewhat wrong, and it rewards the one who is least wrong. That changes the mood at the table. Nobody is embarrassed by an estimate, everybody has an opinion, and the answer — "eleven thousand metres? really?" — is a small piece of the world that most people did not have a number for a minute ago.
That is also why estimation rounds make good tie-breakers and good final rounds: the scores can still move, and the person who has been losing all night can win one by having a better feel for how long a river is. Four things separate a good estimation question from a bad one, and they are worth checking before you use any of the thirty below.
Four rules for a good one
One: the answer must be a single, checkable number. "How many people live in Berlin" has an answer (about 3.8 million); "how many people are happy in Berlin" does not. If two reference works disagree by more than the margin you are going to score with, pick a different question.
Two: the scale must be guessable from things people know. The Eiffel Tower is a good question because everyone has seen a tall building and can reason from it. The mass of an electron is a bad one because nobody has an anchor — the guesses are random, and a random round is a boring round.
Three: the answer should surprise. The best estimation questions have a true answer that is two or three times what most people guess, or a third of it. "How many hearts does an octopus have" is not an estimation question; "how long is the Nile" is, because almost everyone guesses too low.
Four: say the unit. "How tall is Mount Everest" needs "in metres" or the room will argue about feet afterwards. And decide before the round how the answers are scored: nearest wins the point, or a sliding scale by distance. Both are fair; only announcing it late is not.
Geography: distances and heights
How tall is the Eiffel Tower, including its antennas, in metres? About 330 (the antenna was extended in 2022; the iron structure alone is 300).
How long is the Rhine, in kilometres? About 1,230.
How long is the Nile, in kilometres? About 6,650 — most people guess under 4,000.
How high is Mount Everest above sea level, in metres? 8,849 (the figure agreed by China and Nepal in 2020).
How deep is the deepest point of the ocean, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, in metres? About 10,900.
How high is the tallest waterfall on earth, Angel Falls in Venezuela, in metres? About 979.
How long is the Great Wall of China, counting every section ever built, in kilometres? About 21,200, by the 2012 Chinese survey. The main Ming-era wall alone is about 8,850.
What is the area of Germany, in square kilometres? About 357,600.
How large is the Sahara, in square kilometres? About 9 million — roughly the size of the United States.
How far is the Moon from Earth on average, in kilometres? About 384,400.
Science and the human body
How many bones does an adult human have? 206. (A newborn has around 270; many fuse.)
How many teeth does an adult have, wisdom teeth included? 32.
How many times does a human heart beat in a day, at a resting rate of about 70 per minute? About 100,000.
How fast does light travel, in kilometres per second? About 300,000 (299,792 exactly).
How long does light from the Sun take to reach Earth, in minutes? About 8 minutes 20 seconds.
How hot is the surface of the Sun, in degrees Celsius? About 5,500.
How long can a blue whale grow, in metres? Up to about 30 — the largest animal known to have lived.
How many languages are spoken in the world today? About 7,000 (Ethnologue counts a little over 7,100).
How many people live on Earth? About 8.1 billion (2024).
How many keys does a standard piano have? 88 — 52 white and 36 black.
Numbers people think they know
How long is a marathon, in kilometres? 42.195 — a distance fixed at the 1908 London Olympics so the race could finish in front of the royal box.
How many squares are on a chessboard? 64.
How many member states does the European Union have? 27, since the United Kingdom left in 2020.
How many seats does the German Bundestag have after the 2023 electoral reform? 630.
How tall is the Berlin TV Tower, in metres? 368 — the tallest structure in Germany.
How many people live in Berlin? About 3.8 million (2023).
How many people live in Germany? About 84 million (2024).
How long is the German Autobahn network, in kilometres? About 13,200.
In what year were the first modern Olympic Games held? 1896, in Athens.
How many gifts are given in total in the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas", if every verse's gifts are counted again each day? 364.
Scoring a nearest-wins round fairly
The simplest fair scoring is by rank: the closest estimate gets 3 points, the next 2, the next 1, everyone else 0. It needs no arithmetic beyond sorting, it does not care whether the guesses were close or wild, and it works with any number of players. Ties on distance share the points.
The more precise scoring is by distance, which is what a platform can do automatically. On omequiz an estimation question carries a range, and the tolerance is a tenth of it: an exact answer is worth 1,000 points, each tolerance of distance costs 100, and an answer at the far edge of the range is worth nothing. It means being half as wrong is worth exactly twice as much, and it means an estimation can be worth up to ten multiple-choice questions — which is why a round with two of them at the end is never decided before they are played.
Whichever you use, two habits make the round better. Give the range or the unit out loud so the guesses are comparable. And read out everybody's estimate before the answer — the spread of guesses is half the fun, and a room that has heard "eleven hundred" and "nine thousand" for the same question leans in for the truth.
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