Event night walkthrough: laptop, TV and paper

How the night fits together

There are three pieces. Your laptop is the control desk: you read from it, advance questions, mark answers and confirm scores. The TV is what the room looks at. The answers come in on paper, on phones, or both.

In Brainflood each round has its own answer mode: paper, phones or hybrid (some teams on paper, some on phones, in the same round). Standard, picture and music rounds work any of the three ways. Lightning, Wagering and Poll rounds are phone-only, so if your crowd is strictly pen and paper, leave those out.

Nobody in the room needs an app or an account. A player scans the QR on the TV, types a name and picks or makes a team. Paper teams don't need to touch a phone at all, except for one person who checks the team in if you use check-in.

Everything below is plumbing between those three pieces. Once you have done it twice, the setup takes about ten minutes.

Each stop has its own section below. Tap one to jump to it.

The day before

Build the game at home, not in front of an arriving crowd. Rounds, questions, picture questions, music clips: all of it. Then run through the first round on your couch with the TV page open on a second screen or a phone. You are looking for a picture that didn't upload, a clip that starts on the wrong bar, or a typo in a question you will read aloud.

For a paper or hybrid night, download the print pack. It is a ZIP with everything a paper night needs: answer sheets for each round (one team per page, with Artist and Title boxes on music rounds and a tie-breaker line), numbered picture handouts, a team check-in poster, a join poster and table tents, a scorer worksheet, a run of show and your answer key. Print it the day before. Printers die on game day more often than seems fair.

Count your sheets. Twenty teams and six rounds is 120 answer sheets, plus picture handouts, plus a few spare blanks for the team that spills a pint on round three.

Then pack and charge:

• Laptop and charger.
• Mic, with fresh batteries or a full charge, if you bring your own.
• An HDMI cable long enough to reach the venue TV (25 feet covers most rooms) and the adapter your laptop needs. Many thin laptops only have USB-C, so you need a USB-C to HDMI adapter. Keep a spare in the car.
• A power strip, gaffer tape, pens and clipboards.
• Your phone, charged, for the hotspot.

If it is a new venue, find out about the TV before the night. Is it a smart TV with a web browser? Is there a streaming stick plugged into it? Which input is free? Does the bar need it for the game that night? Five minutes of questions on a quiet afternoon beats twenty minutes of fiddling with a remote while teams sit down.

At the venue, before people arrive

Get there 45 minutes early for a room you know and an hour early for a new one. The setup is quick when it goes right. The extra time is for when it doesn't.

Pick a spot near a power outlet where you can see the TV from your seat. You want to glance up and know what the room is looking at. Tape down any cable that crosses a walkway with gaffer tape, which comes up clean. Duct tape leaves a sticky mess the bar staff will remember.

Connect to the venue Wi-Fi and load a page or two. If it is slow or keeps dropping, switch to your phone's hotspot now, while there is time to decide. A trivia game uses very little data. Karaoke videos use a lot more, so test a couple of them on whatever connection you plan to use.

Log in at app.brainflood.com, open your game and leave it on the lobby. Put the check-in poster on the wall and a table tent on each table. Then get the TV going.

Getting the game on the TV

There are two ways. The first needs no cable at all.

On the TV's own browser

If the TV has a web browser (most smart TVs do) or a streaming stick that has one, open app.brainflood.com/tv on the TV and type your 5-character game code. That's it. The TV follows your whole night from then on: the lobby, every question, the scores, the final results. There is no login on the TV, and you never touch it again.

Put the browser in full screen if it has the option. TV browsers vary a lot, and some streaming sticks need a browser app installed first, so try it on the venue's TV before your first night there rather than during it.

This route keeps your laptop free. Your control desk stays on your screen and nothing you click shows up on the wall.

With an HDMI cable from your laptop

If the TV has no browser, or the one it has is too slow to use, run the game from your laptop.

1. Plug the HDMI cable into a free port on the TV and note which one (HDMI 1, HDMI 2). Plug the other end into your laptop or adapter.
2. Press Input or Source on the TV remote until your laptop's desktop appears. No remote? Most TVs have an input button on the side or back. If you can't change the input at all, ask the manager. Some bars have the cable box locked to one port.
3. Set your laptop to extend the display, not mirror it. On Windows, press Windows + P and pick Extend. On a Mac, open System Settings, then Displays, and turn off mirroring. On a Chromebook, turn off Mirror Built-in Display in the display settings.
4. In the game, press Open TV. A browser window opens with the room's view. Drag it across to the TV and make it full screen (F11 on Windows, Ctrl + Cmd + F on a Mac).

More than one TV

A bar with screens over the bar, in the back corner and on the patio wants the game on all of them. This used to mean a splitter, a pile of HDMI runs or a second laptop with someone advancing every slide twice.

If each TV has a browser, open app.brainflood.com/tv on each one and type the same code. Every screen follows the night by itself. There is no limit on how many TVs can do this.

For a TV with no browser, you have three choices:

• A cheap streaming stick that has a browser, plugged into that TV. Once it works, the venue might let you leave it there.
• An active HDMI splitter (the kind with its own power cable) from your laptop, with a cable run to each TV. Reliable, but the cables are the job.
• A wireless HDMI kit, a transmitter at your laptop and a receiver at the TV. Hosts who use them say they work well with one condition: plug the receiver into a wall socket, not into the TV's USB port. Most "it keeps cutting out" stories come down to power.

Ask which TVs are yours for the night. On a game night the bar may need two of the five for the sport, and it is better to learn that at four o'clock than at kickoff.

Sound

Two kinds of sound go round the room: your voice and everything the game plays. They often come out of different speakers, and most sound trouble comes from not knowing which is which.

Your voice goes through a mic into the venue's sound system or your own speaker. Do a mic check while the room is empty, then do another when it fills up, because thirty people talking soak up a lot of sound.

Game sound comes out of whatever device is showing the TV page. Music round clips play on the TV when you press Play on TV, karaoke videos play on the TV, and read-aloud plays on the TV once it is able to play sound (some TV browsers need one tap or click on the page first; otherwise read-aloud plays on your laptop). So:

• If the TV page is running on the TV's own browser, the sound comes out of that TV, or its soundbar. If the venue's speakers are not connected to that TV, the music round will be quiet. Either connect the TV's audio output to the venue system, or run the TV page from your laptop instead.
• If you run the TV page from your laptop over HDMI, the sound goes wherever your laptop sends it. HDMI usually makes the TV the output. To use your own speaker instead, plug it into the laptop and pick it as the output in your sound settings.
• With several TVs, choose one to carry the sound (the one wired to the speakers) and turn the others down so a clip doesn't echo round the room.

Wired beats Bluetooth for anything that matters on the night. Bluetooth drops, and it adds a delay that is obvious in a music round. Then play a clip, walk to the back of the room and listen. You want the far table to hear every word without the near table wincing.

Running a paper night

Most trivia nights are still pen and paper, and plenty of crowds prefer it. Here is how one runs with Brainflood doing the arithmetic.

Check-in

Typing twenty team names into a laptop while people find seats is nobody's favorite job. With check-in, one person at each table scans the QR on the check-in poster (or on the TV) and types the team name. The team appears in your game straight away. No account, no app, and the page never asks for an answer: answers stay on paper. Teams who played in the last ten weeks see their old name and can tap it instead of typing.

If a table would rather not, write their name down and add the team yourself.

Marking

Hand out each round's sheets, read the round, collect the sheets. Then mark them in one of two ways in the live console:

• Round totals. Mark the sheets by hand as you always have and type each team's score for the round. Quickest.
• By question. A grid with a row per team and a column per question. Tick each right answer; the arrow keys and space bar let you go through a stack of sheets without the mouse. It adds up the totals and shows what share of teams got each question right.

Either way, you can fix a mark and save the round again. The new scores replace the old ones and nothing is counted twice. The By question grid also handles the usual house rules: a once-per-game double-points joker for each team, list questions scored per item, and setting every question in a round to the same value at once.

Marking takes ten or fifteen minutes for a big room. Don't try to make that break disappear. It is when people order another round, go outside, and talk to the next table. Keep music on and let it run.

Standings on the TV

Put the standings up after each round. Many hosts show ranks only, with the points hidden: it saves arguments about marking. At the end of the night, reveal the standings from last place up to the winner, one row at a time. For a tie, the closest-number panel in the live console takes each team's guess, ranks them by how far off they are (with an optional "without going over" rule) and can put the result on the TV.

The paper night page covers the whole kit, and scoring, prizes and fair play covers marking policy, disputes and tiebreakers.

During the game

Once the TV is up and the sound works, the technology mostly stays out of the way. Here is what the room sees, so you know what to talk over.

In the lobby, the TV shows the join QR and code, the teams that have joined, and each new name popping up as it arrives. People like seeing their team name on the big screen, so read a few of them out.

During a question, it shows the question and, on phone rounds, a cue to answer on your phone and a running count of how many have answered. Phone players don't see whether they were right until you reveal the answer, so nobody's screen gives the game away to the next table. Team points wait until you confirm the scores, and you can flip any grade first.

If you have Auto Assist on, you get a one-line pacing hint in the console (everyone has answered, time's up, answers to check) and grading suggestions for typed answers. Both are optional and can be switched off.

Karaoke: a screen for the singer

In Brainflood's karaoke, singers join the line from their phones, you pick a YouTube karaoke video for each one, and the TV plays it. The lyrics are whatever that video shows. Between songs the TV switches between the join QR and the waiting list.

The problem every karaoke night runs into: the screen the room watches is usually behind the singer, or across the room from them. A singer who faces the crowd can't read it, and one who turns to read it has their back to everybody.

The fix is a second screen at the singer's feet, called a confidence monitor. Any small TV or computer monitor with an HDMI input works. Wire it like this:

1. Run the TV page from your laptop's extended display.
2. Laptop to the input of an active HDMI splitter.
3. One splitter output to the room's TV, with a long cable.
4. The other output to the singer's monitor on a low stand in front of the mic, with a short cable.

A splitter sends the identical picture to both screens at the same moment, so the words the singer reads match the music the room hears. That matters more for karaoke than for trivia, which is why the splitter still earns its place here even when every TV in the bar has a browser.

When something goes wrong

The TV says no signal

Check the input first, then reseat the cable at both ends, then try a different HDMI port or your spare adapter. In that order: the input is the usual culprit.

The room can see my console

You are mirroring. Switch to extend (Windows + P on Windows; Displays in System Settings on a Mac), then drag the TV window over.

The music is coming out of the wrong speaker

Find the device the TV page is running on and check its output: your laptop's sound settings, or the TV's audio settings. On a laptop, the TV appears in the output list by its brand name once HDMI is connected.

Read-aloud is silent on the TV

Many TV browsers won't play sound until someone has tapped or clicked the page once. Do it during setup. Until then, read-aloud plays on your laptop.

The Wi-Fi died

Switch your laptop to your phone's hotspot and keep talking. After a short drop, the TV and the players' phones reconnect on their own and pick up where the game is. Paper teams won't notice anything. If the connection is gone for good, finish on paper: that's what the spare answer sheets in your bag are for.

The picture looks washed out or laggy

Look for a Game or PC picture mode in the TV's settings. It turns off the motion smoothing and color processing that make text look soft. It's worth setting once at each weekly venue.

The TV went to sleep

Some TVs have their own sleep or eco timer that ignores what's on screen. Find it in the TV's settings and turn it off for the night, and ask the staff to tell you if they ever change it back.

Wrapping up

After the reveal, the TV's final screen shows the results, plus your tip QR if you have saved your Venmo, Cash App, PayPal or Zelle details. Phones get a quiet "Tip your host" button at the same time. The money goes straight to you.

• End the game from the live console.
• Take a photo of the final standings on the TV for your socials and the venue's.
• Tell the room what's on next week before they get up to leave.
• Collect the pens. You will still lose some.
• Unplug at the TV first, put its input back to whatever the bar had on, and pack the cables.
• Settle up with the venue, confirm next week, and tip the bar staff who brought your drinks all night.

The print pack also makes a results poster and certificates after the night, if your venue likes to pin the winners up.

A setup checklist for your bag

For what to buy, from the first cable to a karaoke rig, see the equipment guide. The host handbook in the app has the step-by-step for every console screen at app.brainflood.com/help/host.