The 117th Semi-Annual Williams Trivia Contest

What the heck is Williams Trivia?

Trivia is a glorious and time-honored Williams tradition dating back to 1966. Once in January and once in May, all Williams students—and anyone else who wants to play!—are invited to stay up way too late for a night of music, puzzles, goofy performances, and things-you-know-but-can't-quite-remember. It's the final exam for everything you never learned at Williams College.

We are Badger-Sputumly Inconsequential Trivia, the team who won the last contest. That is the prize for winning trivia: more trivia! If you win this contest, you have the privilege and responsibility of running the next one.

What you'll need:

• As many friends, entrymates, family members, vague acquaintances, complete strangers, or messy mix of all three as you can gather, representing as wide a variety of tastes as possible. There is no limit on team size. There have been Trivia teams with more than 80 people, and many with just one person.
• This contest will be entirely virtual, and each team will have its own chat room. Geographically dispersed teams are welcome to create their own voice chats for added camaraderie, so your team members can be anywhere with an internet connection.
• Snacks! Under no circumstances should snacks be omitted. (Well, maybe if you have a colonoscopy tomorrow or something. But we hope you don’t.)
• Reference books. Courage. Your life's experiences. An enthusiasm for nonsense. An inner (or outer) nerd and/or geek. Caffeine.

In the days before the contest:

1. Pick a team name. Any name will do!
2. Before 10:00pm Eastern Time on May 15th, go to www.williamstrivia.com and register your team.
3. Set your team picture to be either a photo of your team or something evocative of your team's name (worth one point)!
4. Make sure that everyone knows the team password.

Just before 10:00pm:

1. Find the link to the audio stream on the main page (the Big Purple Button), and open that. That's how you'll hear questions (make sure your computer runs it without issue).
2. Also click on the link to your team's chat room in the upper-left corner of the homepage.

What will happen:

• At 10:00pm, we will read a question over the air, and then play a song. You have the duration of the song to tell us the answer to the question. You get one point for answering the question correctly, and one point for naming the song and artist. You may not use any internet resources (search engines, song-identifying apps, etc.) to help you identify the song and artist. We don’t absolutely ban using the internet to answer the trivia questions, but we recommend against doing so for your sake; the addition of automated AI responses has made googling questions less than fun, and this contest is all about having fun!
• There will be a member of our team hanging out in your team’s chatroom as a host. To give answers, type them in your chat room.
• You may ask your host for hints, and your host will usually answer yes-or-no questions about the answer. Usually. If you're nice. (If your host is busy with multiple teams, please be patient with them! They’re here to help you, and are doing their best.) You get as many guesses on any given question as you can fit into the duration of the song, but when the song ends, time’s up!
• Now lather, rinse, and repeat. Those are the "on-air" questions, and they will continue all night.

But wait, there's more!

• Every hour, we will post an Hour Bonus on the website. It will contain a set of questions on a particular topic or theme, like "Pirates" or "The Letter Q" or "Songs About Butts." You have a full hour to answer them in your team's Google Doc answer sheet. You may choose to use the internet or not, and must answer “yes” or “no” as to whether you used it. If you do not use the internet, your bonus will be worth significantly more points (and will probably also be more fun)!
• And even more! There will be two Super Boni, released at 10:00PM and 2:00AM. (In Williams Trivia, the plural of "bonus" is "boni." It just is.) They work the same way as Hour Boni; they’re just bigger. You have four hours for each of these, and they are completed in their corresponding Google Doc.
• There's also the dreaded Ultra Bonus: a series of clues spread out over the whole night. You have to tell us how they're connected. The sooner you do, the more points you get. You can guess as many times as you want, so keep 'em coming. Traditionally, especially funny guesses will be read on-air at the end of the contest, so feel free to try to amuse us.
• We will also have seven Action Boni, which will ask you to do things such as act out a scene, dance, sing, draw, or otherwise Do Something besides just sitting and answering trivia questions. Points for style and commitment! (Videos uploaded to a Google Drive are perfect for sharing with us, as are YouTube uploads and the like. Images can also be uploaded to places like Google Drive or to Imgur.)

More Info

Be sure to read the official contest rules for all the nuts and bolts.

Almost all the trivia from the past 116 contests is online in the Trivia archive at wso.williams.edu/orgs/trivia. If you want to see what questions and boni are like, go there.

The Trivia mailing list is where you can hear glowing or scathing reviews of the contest afterward, see us break down how we wrote this contest and share some of the best answers we received, and post your own postmortem (highly recommended; we love getting post-contest feedback, and the Trivia community is pretty great). To join, go to wso.williams.edu/mailman/listinfo/trivia_wso.williams.edu.

So start forming your team and planning your snacks as soon as possible. Send any questions you have to me at badgersputum@gmail.com. We look forward to grading your answers and being delighted by your Action Boni on Friday, May 15th!