UQCS "Not Quite Trivia" Night

The UQ Computing Society (UQCS) recently wanted to hold some sort of welcome night for the new semester. Having suggested a quiz-show-like format that was "not quite trivia", I got allocated with coming up with the questions. Being a bit of a quiz show fan, this was great fun. Coming up with the format of the night was a little tricky; I've been to previous game-show inspired trivia nights and often found that the "show" format does not carry over well into a many teamed event. In the end the commitee settled on having sheets of problems that teams would solve in 10-15 minutes. All that was left was to come up with questions.

Writing the questions themselves was a blast. The first round was to be based off the numbers section off Letters and Numbers (which is itself based off the UK show Countdown), with questions consisting of 6 smaller numbers which teams had to combine together to obtain the given target number. The puzzles themselves weren't of particular interest, but I did find that teams struggled with the harder problems much more than expected (though this shouldn't have been too surprising, as I do like these puzzles a lot).

This was followed by some of the conundrum style problems from Letters and Numbers where two words are given that need to be rearranged into a larger word. My partner Faith helped with a lot of these. A good anagram tool was useful here, and made our lives much easier. I'm don't feel particularly exultant about any of these, but they are nice little puzzles. Note that I have only included some of them below (click to reveal the answer), specifically the more interesting programming related ones.

Only Connect is one of my favourite quiz shows, so I had to add some puzzles from it. I chose to base them off the Connections round, where contestants have to guess the connection between four clues, as this was easiest to do in a preallocated format. These were the best received and also the most fun to make. I chose to make the clues unordered, as they were revealed all at once (and to make it a little easier). Thanks again to Faith for helping with some of these. I haven't included all of them here, as some of them were UQCS specific.

Overall, it was a great event. Next time, I'd probably cut back on the numbers round and try to maybe add a round of missing vowels or a "guess the output of this (unconventional) code". There is also a bit of a split between people who like tricky geeky puzzles and those who want to socialise, which we didn't quite balance quite right. I still think that you can socialise over tricky geeky puzzles; maybe others just need to be persuaded.