Trivia for remote teams: async, live and across time zones

Async or live?

Most of the decisions follow from this one. The two formats suit different teams, and a distributed team usually wants both.

• Async rounds are announced in a channel with a deadline. Each person answers privately, in a direct message with the bot, whenever suits them; when the deadline passes the results and leaderboard post back to the channel. Nobody needs to be online at the same time, nobody copies the fastest typist, and a teammate eight hours ahead plays on equal terms. In Hijinks the deadline is set in hours and defaults to 48.
• Live rounds post one question at a time with answer buttons and a timer — 30 seconds by default in Hijinks, adjustable from 15 to 60. They take a few minutes, and they are the better fit for a stand-up, the start of an all-hands, or a team that mostly shares a time zone.

A cadence that sticks

• Weekly async round. A short quiz, open from Monday to Wednesday. Enough to become a habit, not enough to become noise.
• A daily question. One question that stays open all day, for people who like a two-minute break. In Hijinks the trivia of the day takes one schedule and none of the month’s games.
• A live round now and then. Monthly, or to open an all-hands, when most of the team is online anyway.
• Let a schedule post it. A ritual that depends on someone remembering stops the week that person is on vacation. Schedules run in the time zone you set, on Pro (three schedules) and Team (twenty).

Make it fair for everyone

• Questions that travel. Pick categories rather than defaulting to one country’s sport and television. On Pro and Team you can add your own questions — about the product, the company, the team’s in-jokes — with a CSV import.
• Opt-in, not mandatory. Post in a channel people choose to join, and let anyone mute the pings: in Hijinks each member can mute notifications for themselves. Celebrate taking part, not just winning.
• Fresh starts. A leaderboard that one person has led for a year stops being fun. Weekly and monthly boards, category champions and leaderboard seasons give everyone another shot.

Beyond trivia

Trivia is the anchor, but remote teams mostly miss the small talk. The same bot can post icebreakers (Would You Rather, Hot Takes, Most Likely To) and Small Talk prompts on a schedule, pair people for Virtual Coffee 1:1 intros, run Know Your Team rounds built from teammates’ own answers, and post birthdays and work anniversaries that members enter themselves. A starting list is on the 100 icebreaker questions page.

Running it with Hijinks

1. Add Hijinks to Slack, Discord or Telegram and invite it to a channel or group.
2. Start an async round with a deadline, or a live round, from the /hijinks command; set up recurring rounds in the dashboard at app.hijinks.team.
3. Pick the categories, and add your own questions if you are on Pro or Team.
4. Let the leaderboard post itself, and start a new season when the board gets stale.

Hijinks is priced flat per organization — Free at $0, Pro at $5 a month and Team at $15 a month — so a team of 40 pays the same as a team of 12. Platform specifics are in the guides for Slack, Discord and Telegram, and the comparison page sets Hijinks next to other trivia apps.