A Christmas food quiz for the office party (that nobody has to write)

The easiest office Christmas quiz is a food quiz you do not have to write. Mosey's free Christmas food countdown has one festive food question a day, three answers each, with a short fact after every answer. Pick five to eight doors, read them out over the meal, let teams write down their letters and keep score on a napkin. That is a full quiz round.

This guide shows how to run it at a work Christmas do, in a restaurant or in the office, with a plan for teams, scoring, tie-breakers and the colleague who hates quizzes. It also covers the other half of the job, which is getting the whole team to one table, fed and happy.

How do you run an office Christmas quiz without writing the questions?

Most office quizzes stall at the same point: somebody has to write them. That somebody is usually the person already organising the meal, collecting dietary needs and chasing the deposit. The countdown removes the job. Its questions are Christmas food facts from around the world, written for a general audience, so nobody needs to know the answer in advance and nobody feels the quiz is aimed at them.

Here is the shortest version of the plan:

• Before the do: decide how many doors you will use and agree not to open them early.
• At the do: the quizmaster opens one door at a time, reads the question and the three answers aloud, and teams write down a letter.
• After each door: the quizmaster taps an answer, the app shows the right one with a short fact, and the quizmaster reads the fact out. The fact is the entertaining part, so do not skip it.
• At the end: add up the letters each team got right. Tie-breaker below.

You need one phone with the game on it and a pen for each team. No projector, no slides, no printing.

What is the Christmas food countdown?

The Christmas food countdown is a free daily quiz on the Mosey website and in the app. Door 1 opens on 12 November and a new door opens each day after that, up to door 44 on Christmas Day, going by the date where you are. Each door asks a single question with three answers. You pick one, you see the right answer straight away, and a short fact explains it.

Some doors ask what is traditional at Christmas in a particular country. Others ask where a Christmas classic comes from. The questions are about food, not about trivia you could only know from living somewhere, so a table of colleagues from several countries starts on roughly level ground. You do not need an account to play on the website.

Two details matter for a party. Each door can be played once, so a door that someone has already opened is spent for that person. And a door that has opened stays open: if you miss a day, you can catch up until 6 January. One more: once a door's day has ended everywhere, its answer goes up on the Mosey website, so ask people to keep their phones down while a round is on.

Which doors should you save for the party?

This is the one piece of planning that makes the quiz work. Anyone who has opened a door already knows its answer, so tell the team early in the countdown: leave the doors you will use for the party alone. If the party is in the second week of December, everything up to that date has opened, and the doors you want are sitting there, waiting.

A good way to do it:

1. Look at the calendar in the countdown a few days before the do and pick the doors that are open.
2. Choose a spread. Some doors are about dishes people know, others are about dishes they will have to guess.
3. Write the door numbers on the invitation or in the team chat, with one line: "Please leave doors 20 to 25 closed until the do."
4. Play the rest on your own phone as you like. The countdown is meant to be a daily habit, so a team that plays the other doors all month will arrive in a good mood.

If someone has already played every door, that is fine. Make them the quizmaster: a door they have played reopens with the right answer marked and the fact below it, so they can read out the question and the three answers, then the answer and the fact.

How do you use the countdown as quiz rounds?

Use the doors as the questions, and organise them into rounds so the evening has a rhythm. Because each door has three answers, a round of five doors takes only a few minutes.

An easy structure for a meal looks like this.

Moment	What happens	Time it takes
While people arrive	Teams are agreed and named	A few minutes
After the starters	Round one: five doors	A few minutes
After the mains	Round two: five doors	A few minutes
With dessert	Round three: a final door, then the tie-breaker	A few minutes

The gaps are deliberate. A quiz that runs through the whole meal turns into a lecture. A quiz in short bursts between courses gives the table something to talk about and leaves the conversation alone.

Name the rounds if it helps: "Pudding", "Around the world", "Dishes you only see in December". The names are yours, so group the doors by how they read to you.

How do teams keep score?

Keep it on paper. A team writes A, B or C for each door. The quizmaster reads the right answer, teams mark themselves, and each right letter is a point. At the end of each round the quizmaster asks for the score and writes it on a napkin or a piece of paper where everyone can see.

Some choices that avoid arguments:

• Teams of four to six. Mix departments, and put the person who organised the meal on a team with someone from a different floor.
• A captain per team, who is the only person who gives an answer. This stops a table shouting three answers at once.
• No changing a written letter once the quizmaster has started reading the fact.
• Tie-breaker: agree it before the quiz starts. Origin, described below, is the cleanest, because it scores by distance. A closest-number question of your own also works if the answer stays secret until it is asked.

Which food facts make good sample questions?

If you want a few extra questions of your own for an early start, here are five that rest on encyclopedia entries, and each makes a good conversation, not only a point.

1. Which Italian city is panettone associated with? Milan, in Lombardy. It is a bread usually prepared for Christmas and New Year.
2. Stollen is a Christmas fruit bread from which country? Germany. It is a yeast dough with dried or candied fruit, nuts and spices, often finished with sugar.
3. What is traditionally done to a Christmas pudding at the table? It is doused in brandy, set alight and brought to the table with ceremony, often decorated with holly.
4. What did small silver coins have to do with Christmas pudding? They were commonly mixed into it, and whoever found one in their serving could keep it.
5. Did mince pies always have meat in them? Historically they were made with meat. Modern mincemeat does not contain meat, though some recipes still use beef suet.

A bonus question for the table that has already won: a bûche de Noël is a sponge cake made to look like what? (A small log, a form of roulade, most associated with France.)

Treat these as a warm-up. The countdown has far more, and it will not run out of new ones before the party.

Can you play Origin and Ingredient together at the party?

Yes, and they suit a different part of the evening. Both are free daily food games, and both give everyone the same puzzle on the same day. The day turns at midnight where you are.

Origin asks you to place a dish on the world map. A game has five rounds and you are scored by distance, so a close guess beats a far one. At a table, it works as a team game: the team talks, agrees where the dish comes from, and one person drops the pin. Compare scores at the end. Because the score is a distance, ties are rare, which makes it a fair tie-breaker.

Ingredient takes one dish and asks seven questions with four options each, from easy to expert. It is better as an after-dinner game: pass the phone around the table, one question each, and see how far the table gets before someone is stumped.

Neither game is a quiz you can replay later. A puzzle is played on its own day, so the plan is simple: if the party is on a Thursday, play Thursday's puzzle at the party, and let nobody look at it first.

How do you keep the quiz going after the party?

Play the countdown on your own phone through December and share the score without spoiling anything. The share line is short and gives away nothing: something like "I got 31 of 44". Your score is out of the doors you have played, so a late starter is not penalised.

In the Mosey app, the daily games keep a streak on your account, with one freeze earned each week, and weekly leagues are for people who follow each other. A team that all follow each other has a league of its own for the week, and there is no public leaderboard to appear on. The games are free and there are no prizes in them. If the office wants a prize, make it small and make it yours: a round of coffees for the winning team works.

How do you book the meal for the whole team?

The quiz fills ten minutes of the evening. The meal is the rest of it, and it is the part that goes wrong if you leave it late. Our guide to organising a work Christmas meal for a group takes you through numbers, dietary needs and the bill. Here is how Mosey helps with the booking itself.

• Let the team vote on the place. Start a plan from a list of places, choose up to five places and up to two times, and invite colleagues you follow on Mosey to vote. Each person approves every option they would be happy with, and the option with the most approvals wins. The organiser then books the winner. See plan a night out.
• Book a bigger table. A plan books tables of up to eight. For a larger team, the app takes you to a group request, and the place answers with a quote. Deposits and cancellation terms are the place's own and are shown before you confirm.
• Split the deposit. If the place asks for one, add the colleagues who are coming and each person pays a share in the app. A share still unpaid shortly before the booking is charged to the card the organiser saved, so the table is safe. Everyone needs the Mosey app for this. See split the bill.
• Check the dietary needs once. The dietary notes box is for the kitchen to read before service, and a dish's allergen information shows what the place has declared. Mosey shows what the place says and never says a dish is free from something, so confirm with the staff when it matters. The "Hide dishes that list" filter in the app removes dishes that declare the allergens you choose, and a dish with nothing listed means the allergens are not listed: ask the place.
• Choose a place that suits a group. Tags such as Group Dining, Celebration and Business Lunch help you narrow the list. Our guide to choosing a restaurant that suits everyone in a group covers the rest, and the Christmas eating out guide explains set menus and deposits.

What if some people do not want to play?

Every team has a few. Make the quiz optional and keep it light. A table with someone who dislikes quizzes can still enjoy the facts, so give them a job: scorer, timekeeper or the person who reads out the fact. Keep the questions about food, never about colleagues, and keep the rounds short enough that nobody is stuck in a competition they did not choose.

Think about the room too. A quiz in a busy restaurant is a quiz in a loud room. Ask the place whether there is a quieter table or a room for a group, and keep your voice and the phone's volume sensible. The team that wants a chat should not have to shout over a quizmaster.

After the meal, rate what you ate. Mosey lets you rate by the dish, tag the colleagues you were with so they can add their own rating, and keep the place in a list for next year's do. Next year's organiser will thank you.

A checklist for the quizmaster

• Pick five to eight open doors and write their numbers down.
• Ask the team to leave those doors closed.
• Choose teams of four to six, with a captain each.
• Bring a pen per team and a sheet for scores.
• Agree the tie-breaker before the quiz starts.
• Read the fact after each answer, because that is the part people enjoy.
• Play the day's Origin at the end if you want a fair tie-breaker.
• Share scores without spoilers: "I got 31 of 44".
• Rate the meal afterwards.

For more ideas for the season, browse the guides and the ranked lists.