So You Want to Write a Brain Teaser Quiz

Answer:

Unlike the quizzes in most other Fun Trivia categories, Brain Teasers are not as much about what the players know as about what they can work out, so your questions need to provide them with all the necessary information to arrive at the answer, and your information needs to explain clearly how that can be done. The thought process is usually the focus of your information, but you may also include other interesting and relevant facts.

Before you start writing a Brain Teaser, you should have played some, including all of the quizzes in the Quiz Guidelines folder, to get a feel for how the various formats work, and which you might feel comfortable writing. One way of easing yourself in might be to adopt a Brain Teaser that you test play, and feel confident you can provide the necessary improvements to make it a better quiz. This is often just adding an explanation, which was not required in the early days of the site; it may require changing a few questions that do not work (such as those requiring punctuation to be correctly written) or changing format to produce a more accessible quiz. Or you can just select a type of quiz you have enjoyed playing, set up your template in the appropriate subcategory, and start writing.

If your quiz is sitting in a category whose name informs players what kind of questions it is going to contain, you do not need to repeat that information, although you may want to do so in your introduction. You might also include an example such as the ones I used above in the box for Special Instructions for Players if you think it will help players understand the task.

No matter what kind of Brain Teaser quiz you are writing, it is a good idea to have someone try to answer all the questions after you have written it. We all see what we meant, not necessarily what is actually there, and a fresh set of eyes can save a lot of trouble later on. Also, what seems to you like a familiar phrase may not be as widespread in its use as you think, or have different connotations with which you are not familiar.

This is especially true for the more complex formats such as Logic Puzzles and Mystery Sort quizzes, which are not a set of independent single questions, but a combination of answers which are interdependent. You may think your mystery categories are obviously different from each other, and your items fit neatly into place, but you may have missed an ambiguity in one or more of them.

If your questions rely on the sound of words as they are pronounced, as is the case for Homonyms or Fractured Words quizzes, you need to be careful about the fact that not everybody pronounces words the same way, and even if you think they sound the same when you say them aloud, it may not work so well for others. Make sure you are familiar with how a standard American or British dictionary displays the pronunciation, to make sure you are not hearing a very localised pronunciation. (If some players say it differently, at least you can be sure that most will be on board.)

For any quiz that requires players to recognise a familiar phrase to get the answer, make sure that the answer is something reasonably familiar to the average trivia player. You may be quite proud of coming up with a fracture for dipropylheptene (diaper pill leapt teen), but:
(a) few players will immediately come up with this technical term;
(b) at least to my ear, diaper pill sounds more like purple than propyl;
(c) technically you should have included some numbers in there, separated from the neighbouring letters by dashes, to indicate where the double bond is in relation to the propyl branches - so even the chemist who knows the compound will be put off by its technical inaccuracy.

When you are constructing a Wordwise quiz which is based on the way the letters and/or words are presented on the page, you need to consider what needs to be included to make the familiar word or phrase clear. The visual image will often be interpreted with a suitable preposition (e.g., up, down, back, over, under) or an adjective such as big, second or blue (if you are using a coloured image in a photo quiz template). Articles, however, may be left to the player's imagination, or you may choose to include them: the word "somewhere" written directly above the word "rainbow" would lead to "somewhere over the rainbow" - players in this case need to recognise the phrase, and realise that they need to include "the". You might prefer to make it "the rainbow" on the lower line. This is especially recommended if there is any possible ambiguity as to whether the phrase should have a definite or an indefinite article - is it have a heart or have the heart? Both are possible phrases used in different situations.

While there are subcategories for quizzes that are exclusively based on other types of wordplay, such as anagrams, homophones, synonyms, change-a-letter (add, subtract, replace one or more letters with or without rearrangement), hidden words and more, these can all be included in a cryptic quiz. Cryptics are different from the specific word play categories because players must recognise which type of question it is from the question itself. This means you need to become familiar with the standard clues used, which are called indicators. These need to be incorporated into your question, and your information should point them out, so players who haven't seen that one before can add it to their mental list for future use. The more cryptic quizzes you play, the more familiar you will become with the terms commonly used. Fitting them neatly into your clue is an art form that is mastered with practice.