Trivia night packs and host screens

The idea

Every pub trivia host has the same Sunday-night dread: six rounds, 48 questions, written from scratch, again. Hosts running two nights a week spend 6+ hours weekly on writing alone — unpaid labor on top of hosting — and the alternatives are stale question banks their regulars have already heard or $50/pack content subscriptions with no tooling around them. The job isn’t just questions: it’s difficulty balancing, answer sheets, a screen for the room, and scoring.

Bluff AI proves AI-generated party content converts to revenue even as a casual consumer toy. Trivia hosts are the professional version of that buyer — the product replaces recurring labor, not occasional fun, so they pay reliably and weekly usage is built in. The wedge over a bare question generator is being a toolkit: per-host repeat protection (regulars are the whole business), a host screen with reveal animations, team scoring, and printable bundles. That turns a commodity LLM output into a workflow nobody wants to rebuild.

Who pays

Independent trivia hosts — often running nights at 2-4 bars — and the bars themselves pay $19-39 a month; against 6 saved hours a week the math is trivial. Trivia-host companies that franchise hosts across cities are the expansion account. Distribution: trivia host Facebook groups and subreddits (small, dense, chatty), bar-industry newsletters, and hosts recruiting each other — every trivia night is a live demo in front of other would-be hosts.

MVP scope

• Pack builder with themed rounds, difficulty curve, alternate answers, and host notes
• Per-host question history with repeat protection and one-click question swaps
• Fullscreen host screen with answer reveal, round scoreboard, and tiebreaker generator
• PDF print bundle: team answer sheets, host key, picture-round handouts
• Stripe subscriptions with a free sample pack
• Skip for v1: player phones/live answer submission, music rounds with audio, marketplace of human-written packs, league/season standings across weeks, white-label branding

Build QuizForge, a web app that generates complete trivia night packs for hosts. Stack: Next.js, Claude API for question generation, Stripe for subscriptions, react-pdf (or Puppeteer print-to-PDF) for printable sheets.

Core flow: 1) Host configures a pack: number of rounds (default 6), questions per round (default 8), theme per round (80s music, local geography, current events, picture round) or fully mixed, difficulty curve (easy open, hard round 5, crowd-pleaser finish). 2) Claude generates the pack with per-question difficulty ratings, accepted alternate answers, and a host note per question — a fun fact to read after revealing. 3) Every question checks against the host's history in Postgres so regulars never hear repeats — this is the retention feature. 4) Host reviews the pack, swaps any question for a fresh one with one click, then locks it. 5) Game night: a host screen (laptop to TV via browser) shows questions full-screen with answer reveal animations, a scoreboard for entering team scores between rounds, and running totals with a tiebreaker generator. 6) Print bundle: answer sheets per team, host answer key, and picture-round handouts as PDFs.

Pages: pack builder, pack library with question history, host screen (separate fullscreen route), scoreboard, print bundle, billing.

Non-obvious details: current-events rounds need a web-search step at generation time, labeled with generation date; for difficulty balancing, generate 3x candidates and select to fit the curve rather than asking for a difficulty directly.

Pricing: $19/mo (1 pack/week), $39/mo (unlimited packs, picture rounds, multi-venue). Free sample pack to start.