The 117th Semi-Annual Williams Trivia Contest

Rules of the Contest

Here are the official rules for the May, 2026 Williams Trivia Contest. See the Introduction Page for instructions on registering and getting started, and a more general overview.

General

• The contest runs from 10pm Eastern Time on Friday, May 15th to 6am on Saturday, May 16th.
• The website for the contest is www.williamstrivia.com. This is your portal for everything.
• Teams must register before they can play. Click on the Register your team link on the homepage to register. When you do, you have the option to post a link to a picture. If you do, and the picture is either a photo of your team or something which evokes your team's name, then we will award you one magical point. The rest should be pretty straightforward (make sure you write down your team password and share it with all your team members).
• Teams may be of any size. The more the merrier.

Winning

• The winning team is the one with the most points by the end of the contest.
• The prize for winning this contest is eternal bragging rights, sainthood, and the huge honor of continuing a 50+ year tradition and running the next contest.
• Let’s say that again: by registering and participating in this contest, you agree to the sacred covenant of Trivia:

If you win this contest, you will create and host the next contest.

• The next contest will be on a Friday in January of 2027. It's a great honor and a great thrill, but also an obligation. Play responsibly. (You are 100% allowed to try not to win if you don’t want to win. Running the contest is very fun, but it also takes hard work. We want the winning team to want to do it.)

How to Join

See the Introduction Page for instructions on how to join the contest and get set up to play.

On-Air Questions

The heart of the contest is a set of questions asked throughout the night over the audio stream.

• At 10:00pm, we will ask a question over the stream and then play a song. Teams have the duration of the song to answer the question and to identify the song and artist. One point is awarded for the trivia, and another point for the song and artist. Teams submit answers to on-airs via IRC chat rooms accessed through the trivia site. There is no penalty for incorrect answers or for guessing. Each team has an assigned chat host who will tell them whether they’ve answered right or wrong. Once the song ends, that’s it! We’ll announce the question, answer, song, and artist, and then hurry along to the next one.
• That pattern of question/song will continue throughout the night. Occasionally there may be three-point plays, where a piece of trivia is worth two points, and the trivia and song together are worth three points
• There will almost always be some connection between the trivia question and the accompanying song. The connection may be a terrible pun. It may provide you with a hint to the answer, or it might just be an amusing link to the topic of the question. Occasionally the song might be from a show or film (i.e. “The Simpsons Theme”); in this case, you can usually give the name of the show or film (i.e. “The Simpsons”) instead of the artist.
• Important: Technically, you may use the internet to answer on-air questions, though we strongly discourage you from doing so. (It’s just not much fun these days with AI answering questions for you, and this contest is all about fun!) However, you MAY NOT use the internet to look up song lyrics, artists, or anything else related to the song. You MAY use offline or “hard copy” song lists or books if you have them: basically, any resources that do not involve connecting to the internet are fair game. On-airs (and all of Trivia) run on an honor system. Please abide by it.
• You can (and should!) ask for hints from your host, either in the chat room or in Zoom. Traditionally you can also ask any yes-or-no question of your host, and they will usually answer it. Remember to be nice to your host—they are a real person, a volunteer, who has wide discretion over how you are scored!

Boni

In Williams Trivia, the plural of “bonus” is “boni.” It just is. In general, boni are question sets about a specific field or category of trivia. Boni are made available to teams at regular points throughout the night. For all boni except the Ultra Bonus, teams choose whether or not to use the internet and indicate their decisions on their answer sheets. Using the internet incurs a harsh point penalty. Other resources, like books, friends, or professors, remain available to teams completing boni without the internet. Even if you use the internet, web searches should be text only; image and audio searches like Google Image search or Shazam are not allowed. Teams do not submit their completed boni to their chat room hosts; instead, they post their answers to the trivia website. There will be three types of boni in this contest:

Hour Boni

At the beginning of every hour, a link to an Hour Bonus will appear on the website; the contest features eight Hour Boni in total. Teams have until the end of the hour to submit their answers using the answer sheet linked on the web page. Hour Boni are worth up to 15 points if you don't use the internet, and up to 5 points if you do. Trivia graders will deduct points for late submissions (usually one percentage point per minute late).

Super Boni

At 10:00 and 2:00, we will release a “Super Bonus” on the trivia website, which is bigger and badder than a mere Hour Bonus, but maintains the same general form and structure, with the same rules for late submissions. Teams have four hours to complete each Super Bonus. They are worth up to 40 points if you don't use the internet, and up to 15 points if you do.

Ultra Bonus

The dreaded Ultra Bonus! The goal of the Ultra Bonus is to find the connection between a seemingly disparate set of clues. Starting at 10:00, new Ultra Bonus clues release at hourly intervals throughout the night, resulting in eight clues in total. Teams can submit an infinite number of Ultra Bonus guesses. You should not use the internet on the Ultra. The value of the Ultra depends on how early in the night you decipher it, with points awarded following the table below:

Hour	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Score	21	18	15	12	9	6	3	1

Action Trivia

Starting at 10:30pm, we will release “Action Boni” throughout the night at hourly intervals; there will be seven Action Boni in total. Action Boni require creativity and goofiness, and tend, as their name suggests, to be action-oriented: “do X,” “invent Y,” “act out Z,” and so forth. Most frequently, teams act out and film videos for Action Bonus prompts, though other forms of media such as text files, photographs, or drawings may be acceptable submissions depending on the task. (We’ll also be nice about this; if we ask you to perform a brief skit and you just send us a script for one, you won’t get the maximum number of points, but you’ll still get more than 0 as long as you amuse us.) Teams have an hour and a half for each Action Bonus, and they are worth up to 8 points each. Some of the points will be for accurate execution and good trivia, and some for style and whether you make us laugh.

Break

At 2 AM, there will be a break in the contest for 15 minutes or so. It’s a good time to stretch, use the bathroom, refill your drink, and so forth.

The End of the Contest

As the contest nears its conclusion, the ongoing ranking of teams on the website will disappear so as to maintain a sense of suspense about the identity of the winner. When the running team finishes scoring any outstanding boni and tallying up the final scores, the scores will be read on the air, the winner will be announced, and we can all collapse into well-deserved slumber after a long but rewarding night.

And last, but not least...

Have fun!