Throw a travel trivia game night that your friends and family will love with these ideas and inspiration. While the pandemic keeps us from travelling and attending pub trivia – two of our favourite hobbies – we combined these concepts for an entertaining night in.
A travel trivia night makes a romantic, couples evening but can be easily extended to bigger family, friend or housemate groups. My goal was to make our travel trivia tournament minimal fuss and maximum fun – here’s how I went about it.
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Travel trivia questions
Of course, there is no travel trivia without questions and answers. I bought the affordable Travel Trivia cards by Ridley’s Games. There are four sets with different themes: Road Trips, Foodie Holidays, World Tour and City Getaways. Questions are provided with multiple choice answers and you can play different rules for different difficulty levels as detailed on the box.
We found this series to be good quality with an excellent variety of questions covering geography and culture. The only note I would make is that the Road Trips questions are North America and USA-centric, so if you haven’t travelled the US by road, I would suggest one of the other card sets instead. Overall, the Ridley’s Travel Trivia series are excellent value for their price point.
There are a variety of similar travel trivia card games available online such as Gentlemen’s Hardware USA Road Trip Trivia, Games Room Travel Quiz, After Dinner Amusements: Travel Trivia and World Card Series with card sets by continent, however, I haven’t used them personally and can’t comment on their quality.
Travel trivia scoreboard
To add to the spirit of friendly competition, I created a scoreboard using this letterboard. We played a tournament-style format, to extend out the fun over a few nights. Each set of cards was a round, played on different nights. The scoreboard kept tally of the winners of each round until we arrived at a tournament winner.
Game night food ideas
As I mentioned, my goal was to keep preparation, serving and clean up to an absolute minimum so there were few distractions with maximum relaxation and fun.
A charcuterie board or antipasto platter is simple, sophisticated and the perfect trivia companion. You and your guests can graze between questions, there are no hot items going cold and no one has to get up from the table to cook or serve.
Our antipasto platter included cold meats, nuts, pâté, cheese, marinated olives, sun-dried tomatoes and water crackers. You might also include the following:
- Roasted or grilled vegetables like red peppers, asparagus or eggplant.
- Crudités such as carrot, cucumber and/or celery sticks.
- Pesto, tapenade or dips.
- Fresh bread such as a small baguette.
- Fruit that is peeled and sliced or easy to eat as-is, like strawberries and grapes.
- Garnish with stems of fresh herbs, for example, stems of rosemary.
Ensure you make up your platter on a board or tray that you don’t mind your guests using a knife or utensils on. It could be a large wooden cutting board or a marble platter like the one I used. Don’t forget to provide appropriate knives for your cheeses and pâté. Bread and butter size plates and salad forks are all your guest will probably need, along with plenty of napkins.
We had recently been gifted a lovely bottle of wine which we sipped on our travel trivia game night. Wine is an easy self-serve and perfect accompaniment to a charcuterie board, taste-wise. It’s not necessary for anyone to mix drinks throughout the night and there is no ice required. However, if you prefer spirits, gin and tonic pairs well generally, while bourbon and scotch both work well with smokey flavoured meats and cheeses.
Have a super fun travel trivia night. I hope this delights and entertains you and your friends/family during this extended period at home.
Peace, love & inspiring travel,
Madam ZoZo
