But Why?

There are periods in my life when I feel the need to unleash my creative side and let it flourish. This usually happens on a monthly basis and drives me to create something that is less technical or analytical, instead encouraging me to approach a basic task in a creative way.

The Problem

I didn’t have such a problem before my birthday… so I created one. A quiz. Yes! What better way to kick off a birthday party after four hours of travel than with a mind-numbing quiz featuring a fake prize that doesn’t even exist? So I did it—and, as usual, I mostly overdid it.

Initially, I planned to keep things simple: a few sheets of thematic questions to share with my friends. I thought about splitting them into groups to make scoring easier and add some teamwork. The idea was to hold the quiz on our backyard porch, in a small eating area, keeping it stationary and relaxed.

Alcohol Dynamics

Then I thought… what if I turned it into a more dynamic activity, making the teams run around the backyard, the cellar, the house, and other key areas? But just making them walk and run around felt a bit anti-social since they’d hardly interact with one another.

Then it hit me — alcohol can turn a bad idea into a slightly better one by adding a hint of tipsiness to the competitors. At each key station, teams would be penalized for not answering enough questions correctly, with the penalty being an equal number of shots. And then I had a brilliant idea: to reward good teams with the ability to give drinks to other teams based on their performance. This added an entirely new twist to the game, introducing strategic opportunities to make other teams tipsier and, as a result, worse at the following quizzes.

The question sheets usually followed this format:

5 Questions:

5 correct - Give out 2 shots to a chosen team.
4 correct - Give out 1 shot to a chosen team.
3 correct - Distribute 1 shot among yourselves.
2 correct - Distribute 2 shots among yourselves.
1 correct - Distribute 3 shots among yourselves.
0 correct - Distribute 5 shots among yourselves.

Revenge

To make it more fun for myself, I added a twist for the “5 correct” option, stating that the Quiz Master drinks as well. This was meant to incentivize competitors to give back some of the pain I caused them. So now, I have thematic question sheets based on the quiz’s location, a complete game where competitors can distribute shots among the participants, and a fake prize.

Who wins?

Let’s flip the whole concept on its head and make the winners not the team with the most correct answers, but the team that drank the least amount of shots. This added a whole new layer of strategy and tactics. Teams only knew who they assigned drinks to and which team gave them a certain number of drinks. With this partial observation of interactions between other teams, they had to rely on estimation and deduction.

Envelope of Death

Additionally, I introduced a third major dynamic to the game to incentivize speed. Competing teams had to carefully decide which locations to visit and in what order. With three teams in total, I hid three envelopes containing the question sheets at key points of interest around the house. One envelope was placed in an easy-to-find spot, another in a slightly harder location, and the last one was hidden very well. This meant teams had to hurry to be the first at a particular location to find the envelope faster.

Bloat

To further tire their brains, the locations also had to be guessed based on an initial sheet I gave each team. This sheet contained riddles that hinted at the places of interest without revealing them directly. For each location, I created a specific riddle that the contestants had to solve.

The Process

Solve the riddle.
Go to the location.
Find an envelope.
Solve the question sheet.
Distribute drinks.

And that was it—my mind-bending idea to create a quiz for my friends to “enjoy” just so they could hate me once it was all over.

Interestingly, I thought I wouldn’t enjoy being the Quiz Master or taking on an Overseer role. However, I ended up feeling like President Snow watching the Hunger Games. I was pulling the strings, manipulating the teams, faking them out about who was winning, and so on.

Topics Included:

Alcohol-related questions: [The Pince]
Gaming-related questions: [The Számítógép]
Math questions: [The Szerszámos]
Art questions: [The Hinta]
Coffee-related questions: [The Terasz]
Movies and series-related questions: [The Televízió]
Questions related to Magyar Népmesék: [The Padlás]
Food related questions: [The Konyha]

We naturally had a winning team. However, since I had obviously bluffed about a prize, I had to come up with a nonsense story to deflect attention. The rest is history.

The Quizzes in question. Photo: Me 😊

The End

The following day, we had an amazing hiking trip in Glăvoi.

We climbed…

Monke. Photo: My Father

We geocached…

Goldmine. Photo: Me 😊

And we ate at the best little buffet around, called Costi, where most of us enjoyed mushroom cream soup made from freshly foraged mushrooms and house-made lángos.