Game Rules

How a game runs in OpenQuiz — roles, question types, the buzzer, scoring, the final round, timers, and auto-stop.

A game is hosted by the person who started it and played by teams. The host runs the game and judges the answers; everything else is handled by the game itself.

Roles

Host — the person who created the game. There is exactly one host. They start the game, accept or reject answers, pass the turn, change the speed and the reading mode, pause the game, and can kick or ban a participant.
Team — up to 12 teams in one game, up to 3 players in each.
Captain — whoever created the team. The captain picks questions on the board, chooses variants, places auction and final bets, and bans final themes. The host or the captain themselves can hand the role over to another teammate.

The buzzer is the exception: any player of a team can press it, not only the captain.

How a game runs

A round starts with a splash screen showing its themes.
The team whose turn it is picks a theme and a price on the board.
The question plays: text, image, audio, or video — as the pack author composed it.
A team answers, the host accepts or rejects the answer, and the correct answer is shown.
The turn moves on and the next question is picked, until the round runs out of questions.
After the last basic round comes the final round, and after it — the results screen.

Question types

Buzzer question

The classic type. Any team may press; the one that pressed first answers.

Variants

Answer options are shown. The team that pressed first picks one; a wrong pick returns the question to the others.

Variants for all

Every team picks an option at the same time, without the buzzer.

No Risk

Answer freely — a wrong answer costs no points.

Secret Question

The team that got the question hands it over to any team, including itself.

Auction

Teams bid for the right to answer; the highest bid wins and becomes the price of the question.

The buzzer

Presses are not counted in arrival order. After the first press the game collects presses for one second and then compares them by the moment of the press on the player's side, so a slower connection does not decide the winner.
The team that won the buzzer gets 30 seconds to answer by default.
The host accepts or rejects the answer. On a rejection the question returns to the other teams, on a timeout the price is subtracted as well.
A team that has already answered or passed does not take part in this question any more.

If the host enabled question reading mode, the question is first read out and only then opens for answers. You may press the buzzer during the reading, but such a press gets a 2 second penalty: it will lose to any honest press made in the first two seconds after the question opens.

Scoring

Event	Score change
Answer accepted	`+ question price`
Answer rejected	`− question price`
No answer in time	`− question price`
Wrong answer to a No Risk question	no change
Final answer accepted	`+ bet`
Final answer rejected	`− bet`

When accepting an answer the host may apply a multiplier of ×2 or ×0.5 — for example for a partially correct answer. For an auction question the price is the winning bid. The host can also edit any team's score manually.

Final round

Teams ban themes in turn until one is left.
Each captain places a blind bet: at least 1 point and no more than the team's score. A team with a score of zero or below does not take part.
The single final question is played, every team types its answer, and the host reviews the answers one by one.

Speed and timers

The host picks the speed of the game, which scales all timers:

Speed	Timers
Slow	×1.5
Normal	×1
Fast	×0.5

Audio and video are always played at their real length. Pack authors can tune the base durations of steps and stages inside the pack — those settings are ignored in reading mode.

Pause and auto-stop

The host can pause the game for one hour in total over the whole game. Once the budget is spent, the game resumes and can no longer be paused.
A game with no activity for 30 minutes is stopped automatically. Timers ticking on their own do not count as activity.
The maximum lifetime of a game is 5 hours.

Public games

What changes when a game is visible to everyone.