100 Questions — A Party Quiz Tournament

“100 Questions” (in Persian, «۱۰۰ سوالی») is a general-knowledge quiz tournament for parties and get-togethers: players face each other in one-on-one matches on different topics, move from a group stage to a knockout stage, and in the end only one champion remains.

The challenge

Running a quiz at a party usually means paper and a phone stopwatch: the host has to find questions, time every player, write the scores down by hand and work out the winner at the end. Someone always complains their time wasn’t counted fairly, the tables get muddled, and the audience can’t tell where the game has got to. And party Wi-Fi can’t be relied on.

The solution

• A complete, automatic tournament — groups drawn at random (2 to 6 players each, rearranged by drag and drop), group tables, a visual knockout bracket, and a final played as a single match or best of three.
• A fair chess-style clock — each player has 60 seconds (adjustable from 5 to 300), and only one player’s clock runs at a time. The moment a player answers, their clock stops, so the host’s judging time is never charged to them. A tie can never happen.
• Three screens, one game — the host sees each question and its answer on a laptop; the audience sees questions, clocks and tables on the TV (the answer never appears there); and players follow the game on their own phones with a 6-digit code. Every device stays in sync.
• A ready, expandable question bank — 3,000 ready questions across 30 topics; questions can be text, image, audio or video, and can be imported in bulk from an Excel file. Topic cards are ready to print.
• Full statistics and precise rankings — every answer, its response time and each player’s average speed are recorded, and groups are ranked with tie-breakers such as “seconds difference” (like goal difference in football). A history of every game is kept.
• Works offline — after syncing once, the match carries on even if the internet drops mid-game.
• Simple and secure to install — runs on any ordinary PHP host with no MySQL needed. Passwords are hashed, login locks after 5 wrong attempts, and question media is only served to the host.

The result

The host runs the whole tournament — from the draw to crowning the champion — from a single laptop, with no questions to hunt for, no stopwatch and no scores to add up. The audience follows everything on the TV and the players on their own phones. Because the system keeps the clock and the statistics, there are no arguments over time or points, and a dropped connection doesn’t spoil the party.

Built with plain JavaScript (no framework), PHP and SQLite, plus a Service Worker for offline play.