Many of my recent posts have been about trivia. Online trivia, email trivia, website trivia, blah blah blah. I’m doing it in part for work (part of the workplace charitable campaign) but I’m also doing it now through Facebook.

I spent most of the day handling logistical details around getting people registered for trivia tomorrow, I have 8 teams of 5 people playing, and since MS Teams doesn’t offer breakout rooms, I had to fudge the way breakout rooms work. I created 10 separate meetings at the same time, and the people basically just do them in the meeting. They’ll have to manually come “back” to the main meeting after a set amount of time. It has been a lot of work to get the first one up and running AND I have help for it (a moderator and a animator, plus translation assistance).

For the personal side, I ran a beta test last week with 8 people, and a full roll-out this week with 12. It’s free and it’s for family and friends, or friends of friends. We do it through Zoom as my wife has a paid account. Tonight we used breakout rooms, and it made it more social for everyone, except me. Last week, I was in a room with 8 people for an hour. This time, each time people started to have a discussion, it was in the break-out room while I twiddled my thumbs and watched them type in their answers. I’ll figure out some workflows as I go, little tweaks here and there to speed things up. I’ll also add some “bonus” questions for future weeks to add a bit of extra interaction. It was hard tonight to ensure there was a good mix of easy questions and harder questions, questions for kids and adults, etc. My favorite category for the night (Screen Couples) proved hard to mark, and I might have overestimated the weighting for it. One aspect of my automated deck didn’t work as well as I had hoped, so I’ll tweak that too. But overall it worked. I suspect in future that I may offer a separate kids’ game too, just to separate the questions out a bit.

Today I chose to OD on trivia and it all mostly worked. Fingers crossed for work tomorrow.

What choices did you make today?