Submit Your Quizzes to Water Cooler Trivia

A Water Cooler Trivia quiz will be a collaboration between you and our staff of editors, who will seek to preserve your voice while making the quiz as enjoyable as possible for our players. This page of guidelines is a living document and reflects our current best practices on quiz creation.

A summary of what we look for:‍

Themes
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All of our games are released on a specific day / week. We work very diligently to match game content with the calendar. You do not have to have a date in mind when you submit your game to us, but games without a specific tie to the calendar are much less likely to be accepted.

Examples of occasions that make for good games include: holidays, major recurring events, major one-time events, anniversaries, releases, calendar changes, societal celebrations.

We look for clever “takes” on themes. We’re not usually interested in straightforward questions about a topic, rather how that topic can be a launching point for a different way to celebrate the occasion.

Our most recent quiz can be found here. But here are some examples of this in practice:

Basic Rules

For each quiz you submit, you will need to submit a title, the most likely date for the game’s release, an introduction, at least ten main questions, correct answers, answer citations, and a tiebreaker.

For every question, you should provide us with as many of these input fields as possible. The more you provide to us, the higher the likelihood that your submission will be accepted or passed back for editing.

Question text

All of our questions are simple HTML strings. We do support some special characters, but not very many.

Canonical Answer

This is the answer that will be displayed as the correct answer when players finish the game. It should be the “most right” answer.

Other Possible Answers

In many cases, there will be more than one version of an acceptable answer.

If the correct answer, for example, is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then there will be many, many possible correct answers: FDR, Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, etc.

While we hope that you can help us with the other possible answers, it’s much more important when a question’s possible correct answers are very different. For example, if the correct answer to the question is “Firefly,” you’ll want to let us know that “Lightning Bug” and “Glowworm” are possible correct answers as well.

Answer Citation

We try to include a link to a webpage where the players can check the veracity of the answer should they choose. Please cite your sources for us if the question is even close to being something not everyone would know.

There are some rare examples where citations are not required, but you should do everything you can to include them when possible.

Question Count

‍All of our quizzes are ten main questions plus a tiebreaker. We STRONGLY encourage you to submit more than ten questions if your theme/rules allow for it, as our editors will have opinions about which questions will work best for our players.

Rights

‍Water Cooler Trivia quizzes must never have been published anywhere before, either in print or electronically. Water Cooler Trivia buys all rights, including first rights.

You are allowed to have used these questions with your friends, family, or community not in exchange for compensation prior to submitting the quizzes to Water Cooler.

Payment

‍Payment varies based on the number of puzzles you’ve had accepted by Water Cooler Trivia.

Accepted 1-5: $100/accepted game
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Accepted 5+: $150/accepted game

Quiz Template

We've created a submission template, which can be found here. We strongly recommend submitting your quiz in this format as it increases your chances of being accepted, however, we will accept quizzes in other formats.