Williams Trivia (Freshman Edition)

Rules of the Contest

Here are the official rules for the October, 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 8pm Eastern Time until midnight on Friday, October 30th.
• 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 and absolutely nothing else. But bragging rights are pretty fun!
• (In the full-length contest in January, the prize for winning will also include the honor of running the next contest, but you don't have to worry about that this time around.)

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 8:00pm, after we have finished going over these rules on the air, 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 on the title or artist of the song, it may provide you with a hint to the answer, or it may just be an amusing link to the topic of the question. Occasionally, the song might be from a TV show, film, or musical; in that case, you can simply give the name of the show/film/musical in place of an artist.
• Important: 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 to look up any of the above if you have them; 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 in your team chat room. Traditionally, you may also ask any yes-or-no question of your host, and they will usually answer it. Banter and fun with your host is encouraged, but please make sure to be polite and kind to them—your host is a real person who is volunteering to help run this contest, and we want them to have fun, too!

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. Each bonus will be released with an answer sheet, which you will use to submit your answers. For all boni except the Ultra Bonus, teams choose whether or not to use the internet and indicate their decisions at the top of their answer sheets. Boni completed with the internet are worth significantly fewer points than boni completed without internet use. As with on-airs, all offline resources remain available to teams completing boni without the internet. Even if you do use the internet, web searches should be text only; image and audio searches like Google Image search or Shazam are not allowed. 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; this contest features four 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 Bonus

At the beginning of the contest, we will release a Super Bonus on the trivia website. The Super Bonus 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 the Super Bonus. It is 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 single, unifying connection between a seemingly disparate set of clues. Starting at 8:00, new Ultra Bonus clues will be released every half-hour throughout the night (generally in sets of three), resulting in eight sets of clues in total. Clues will tend to get easier as the night goes on. Teams can submit an infinite number of Ultra Bonus guesses, so feel free to offer up your wildest theories! 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 based on the table below:

Correct answer submitted after...	8:00	8:30	9:00	9:30	10:00	10:30	11:00	11:30
Points for correct answer	15	13	11	9	7	5	3	1

Action Boni

Starting at 8:30pm, we will release Action Boni throughout the night at hourly intervals; there will be three Action Boni in total. Action Boni require creativity and goofiness, and tend, as their name suggests, to be action-oriented: “do X,” “make a Y,” “act out Z,” and so forth. Most frequently, teams record 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.

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, turn into pumpkins, or do whatever else you feel like doing at midnight.

And last, but not least...

Have fun!