We hosted our third Harry Potter trivia event almost a year to the day from our first one. Registration didn’t quite fill up this time (we cap at 52 due to the room capacity), but we still had about 50 people: a lot of kids/tweens around 10 years old, plus some families, teens, adults, and even younger kiddos. We’re planning to do it again this summer, around Harry’s birthday, and then make it an annual thing instead of a biannual one.

Program time: 2-4pm. We started checking people in as soon as they showed up, about 10-15 minutes before 2pm. We were going to finish on time, but ended up needing about seven tie-breaker questions, so we went a few minutes past 4pm.

Staff: Four staff members are present at this program. I check people in and MC the event; another one makes the refreshments and manages that table; and two more do the scoring (one collects answers on post-its and the other enters them into a google spreadsheet. If that seems like something that one person could do alone…I invite you to try it!).

Cost: We usually spend about $100 on food and drink and $100 on prizes. I like to do House-themed coffee mugs or travel mugs for door prizes, so we can pick one winner from each House, as well as prizes for the first- and second-place teams. It’s a little bit of a challenge finding cool items in the right price range, because they ought to be equally suitable for adults, teens, and kids, and teams can be up to 4 people, so there must be 4 of each prize for the winning team(s).

Setup:

• Large table for food and drink: This time around, our magical chef whipped up lightning bolt cookies, pretzel wands (not chocolate-dipped this time), jelly beans, and gillywater (seltzer, mint, and cucumber water. Less popular than the butterbeer – cream soda and whipped cream – but also way less sugar and not so sticky).
• Small table for registration and door prizes. If people registered ahead of time, have that list of attendees so you can check them off as they come in. Also, the door prizes, raffle tickets, pens (our teen librarian decorated some bic pens with feathers to make quills), and pads of post-its.
• Small table for scoring
• Chairs for the participants, organized in clusters of 2-4 throughout the room
• A working mic
• Music: We used a laptop streaming from hoopla, but with so many devices in the room it was lagging.
• Decorations: We are minimalist where decorations are concerned. I hung five handmade Golden Snitches from the doorframe, and scattered a few stuffed owl puppets around.
• Photo op: Our teen librarian made a mock-up of the Daily Prophet on posterboard that people can hold up to frame their faces.

Cleanup: There are usually several spills and some dropped food. Chairs need to go back to their places around the edges of the room or get stacked up and returned to storage.

Review: Thanks to my “what to do differently next time” section after last July’s trivia event, and the fact that we’d run this twice before, it went pretty smoothly. When making up the questions, I designed them so that they could be answered in one or two words, and most were single-part questions worth just one point each (there were a handful of two-point questions). However, this made the scores very close, and I had only prepared three tie-breaker questions. With a lot of Potterheads in the room, it can be hard to design questions that are very hard but not impossible! (And, one team caught a mistake in one of the answers about who was the Minister of Magic at the start of the sixth book. After verifying that she was correct, we threw out that question.)

All our attendees seemed happy, and it’s a pretty fun program for staff, too (in my opinion). We’ll be doing it again in July. For now…nox.