Three ways to fill a room
Every game here starts the same way: somebody opens a room, and other people end up in it. What differs is where those people come from, and that is the first decision to make, because it changes how the evening feels.
A private room is the default for a group that already knows each other. You get a short code, you send it, people type it in, and nobody who does not have the code can walk in. It is the right choice for family, a friend group, a class or a team — anyone you would invite to your living room.
A public lobby is the opposite: you open the door and let the site fill the seats with whoever wants to play right now. It is the option for a Tuesday night when nobody you know is free, and the trade is obvious — a game in two minutes, against people you have never met.
Friend codes sit between the two. Once you have played with somebody, you can add them, see when they are online, and invite them straight into a room without passing a code around. Regular groups grow out of this: the friend of a friend who joined once and turned out to be good at geography becomes part of the Thursday game.
The private room, step by step
Open a room, pick one or more categories, set the number of questions, and share the code. That is the whole setup; it takes under a minute even the first time. Up to ten people can be in one room, which is deliberately not more — beyond ten, a quiz stops being a conversation and becomes a broadcast.
When the host starts the round, everybody sees the same question at the same moment, with a clock running. Answers lock the second they are given. Being right earns a flat hundred points; every whole second still on the clock adds two more, so a fast correct answer beats a slow one, and a guess made at the buzzer still counts if it lands. After each question the correct answer is shown, the scores update, and the next one comes.
At the end there is a results screen with the ranking, and the room stays open — the host can start another round with the same people without anyone re-entering a code. Most groups play two or three rounds in a sitting; the first one is usually the warm-up.
Playing your own questions
The question bank covers nine categories, but the best rounds with friends are often the ones about the friends. The quiz editor lets you write your own set — multiple choice or estimation questions, in German and English if you want both — and play it in a room like any other quiz.
A private quiz stays yours: nobody else sees it unless you share the link. If you want it in the public catalogue, it goes through a short review first, and it needs a real description before search engines are pointed at it, because a title with nothing under it is not a page anyone should land on. The guide on writing questions covers what makes a question hold up in front of a group.
Public lobbies and strangers: what a round is actually like
Most sites that put strangers in front of each other give them nothing to do, and a blank screen with a stranger on it is exactly as awkward as it sounds. A quiz fixes that structurally. The question is on screen, the clock is running, and the first thing anyone says is about the answer, not about you. Ten questions later you have laughed at the same wrong answers and there is something to talk about.
Who you meet is who plays quizzes: people who wanted a game, in your language, at the same time as you. The site is not built for meeting people, and it says so; it is built for playing, and meeting people is a side effect that some rooms have and others do not.
How the rooms stay civil is not left to luck. Text chat runs through a filter that catches insults, threats and slurs before they land, and repeated offences lock the account. Every player has a report button that takes one click and does not interrupt the round. Cameras are checked automatically for content that does not belong in a quiz, and a new account has to be a few days old before its camera unlocks at all, which removes the throwaway-account problem almost entirely. The safety page describes each of these in full, including what moderators can see and how long anything is kept.
Camera on or off?
A quiz on its own is a test: you answer, you score, you move on. Add video and it becomes the excuse for everyone to be in the same place. The value is not in looking at each other; it is in seeing the groan when somebody misses an easy one and the grin when they steal the lead on the last question. The questions carry the evening, the camera carries the reactions.
It is optional at every level. Camera and microphone are off until you switch them on, they apply per room and per session, and you can turn them off mid-game without leaving. A round plays exactly the same with text only, so nobody is obliged to be on screen. If you would rather not show your room, background blur and replacement work in the browser.
When to leave it off: a larger room, a faster and more competitive game, or a public lobby where the group has not warmed up yet. A room of strangers usually does better text-only for the first round; cameras can come on later if it turns out to be that kind of room. When to have it on: a small group who know each other and want the hangout more than the leaderboard.
Why a quiz survives a video call when other games do not
Anyone who has tried to run a board game over a video call knows the failure mode: turns. One person acts while nine wait, the lag makes everyone talk over each other, somebody has to keep score in a spreadsheet, and the game that took an hour in a kitchen takes two hours on screen and is less fun.
What survives is anything simultaneous, timed and self-scoring. Everybody answers the same question at the same moment, so nobody waits. The clock ends discussions instead of a host having to. The scoring is done by the game, so there is no spreadsheet and no argument about whether "the Nile" counts when the answer said "Nile". A quiz is the format that happens to be all three at once, which is why it is the one that works.
The practical format that has held up over thousands of rounds: keep the room at six to eight, keep rounds at ten to fifteen questions, mix an easy category with a hard one so different people win different rounds, and stop while people still want another. A ninety-minute quiz night is three rounds with breaks, not one long one.
What "free" actually covers
Most free quiz platforms stop being free at the point where you want to use them: a cap of three or five players, a premium tier for custom questions, or an account wall in front of the person you invited. Those are the three places to check before you send anybody a link.
Here the room, the ten-player limit, the question bank, the editor and video are all available without paying. Joining a room by code needs no account — the person you invited types the code and plays. The daily round needs no account either. An account buys the things that only make sense per person: a streak on the daily round, XP and a place on the leaderboard, the friends list, and the ability to publish a quiz.
The site is paid for by ads on its editorial pages, like this one. There are no ads inside a room or a running game, because a question with a banner next to it is a worse question, and there is no plan for a tier that unlocks players. If that ever changes, this paragraph will say so.
A short checklist before you invite people
Decide private or public before you open the room. Pick categories the group can actually answer — the point is the argument over the answer, not a shutout. Tell people whether cameras are expected, so nobody is surprised. Play the daily round yourself first if you have never seen a question here; it takes two minutes and you will know what you are inviting people to. Then open the room, send the code, and start when four people are in rather than waiting for all ten.
Try it now
Make a room in 30 seconds and send the code to your friends.