Make Your First Mimir Friendly Quiz
A helpful template that handles quad distribution and seat balancing, so you can focus on writing questions.
It's a season of friendlies and the last few weeks have seen a ton of new friendly sets being posted, either on the B612 Whatsapp Group or the Facebook Groups of FLQL and ZQL.
My sense is that more people would probably want to try their hand at creating a Mimir Friendly, so this post is an attempt to make some of the tedious parts of it easier for you. This is obviously just one way of doing it, and there are plenty of others. Other quiz leagues may be using a simpler template, and I’ll link to them here if they’re ever shared publicly.
Here’s the template:
If you do end up using this template, or even if you simply intend to, please drop a like or a comment on this post so I know it’s helping someone. #Validation
The rest of this post is written to be used as a reference manual. You do not read the whole thing, or even part of it. Fiddling around with the above file will probably result in a working Mimir set. If you get stuck, come back here and read the sections that seem relevant to you.
About Mimir Friendlies
Before you start, you should probably know what a Mimir quiz is. There's a nice write-up here: Mimir's Well Format.
The Mimir format is commonly used in online quiz leagues, which are usually a couple of weeks long and mildly competitive. But running a quiz league is a lot of tedious gruntwork, and some people just want to write questions and share those easily. In that situation, they write a single question set in the Mimir format and circulate it on quiz communities for people to play informally amongst themselves in casual games. This is often called “playing a friendly”, and so the question set itself is called a “Mimir Friendly”.
The template assumes that you want to make a 5r4p3q quiz, i.e. a 5-round affair, with 4 players each getting 3 questions in every round. That's a total of 60 questions, meaning 15 quads.
Other formats do exist. Most Indian leagues and friendlies use 8r4p2q, and some recent friendlies have been much shorter. Eg. Our pre-season Timur friendly was a 5r4p2q quiz (40 questions) while Sourjo's Games Hemimir was 4r4p2q and Santosh's Pope Culture Mimimir was a particularly weird 8r4p1q (both 32 questions) . If you'd like to make one of those, you'll need to edit this template quite significantly, and might even be better off making a new distribution from scratch.
Personally, I enjoy rounds with 3 questions each. Players are able to make greater leaps in scores when given 3 directs at a time, and getting a 'Full House’ is a lot more meaningful with 3 questions instead of just 2. Also, the rPOX and pPOX columns on the wikiquiz scoresheet are more exciting if they track 12 questions per round instead of just 8.
Update: On popular demand, we’ve now shared a Hemimir template too. 15/16 quads is a lot for one person to do, and 8 quads or 32 questions just seems much more reasonable.
This is 4r4p2q, meaning 4 rounds of 2 questions each, like Sourjo’s Games set.
Quick Steps for Using This Template
Make a copy of the Mimir Friendly Creator Template.
In the Sheet titled "Seat Wise Format", delete everything in the blue cells. Now replace that content with the names of your 15 quads.
In the Sheet titled “Questions”, delete everything in columns F and G and replace them with your own questions.
When you’re done, download the Sheet titled “TSV” as a .tsv file. This is your primary question set file and will be used by the FLQL Display Questions.
You can also download the same sheet as a PDF for easier use as an answer key, although this step is optional (because of how ugly the default PDF is).
That’s it, you’ve got your first Friendly. Post about it on the B612 Whatsapp Group and watch people fall over themselves trying to schedule their games. You can also ping one of the admins to add the set to the Public Directory for Friendlies.
Build Your Own Set
Now for the more detailed version.
Step Zero: Team Up!
If this is your first time making a Mimir set, find a partner or two to do it with. This will halve the effort (for obvious reasons) and let you release a friendly much faster.
You can always attempt a solo set after that if you really want to.
Seat Wise Distribution
The “Seat Wise Distribution” sheet dictates how questions are distributed between the 4 players in a quiz. Most quads (#1-12) have 4 questions of increasing difficulty, colloquially called L1, L2, L3, and L4. The idea is to balance the difficulty of all seats by using an equal number of L1s, L2s, etc. for each one.
In addition to those 12, there are 3 additional quads (#13-15) that we call non-ascending quads, which is a fancy way of saying all questions are designed to have roughly the same difficulty. Of course, this doesn’t actually happen in practice, but non-ascending quads are a great tool for balancing seat difficulty in a more refined way, and also a good home for experimental questions that you feel unsure about since they won’t bias towards any one seat.
The numbers shown here are the ‘question codes’, so code 8.2 refers to the L2 question of quad #8. The constraints on the distribution are:
Hard constraints:
Each seat should get 3xL1s, 3xL2, 3xL3, and 3xL4 questions from quads #1-12.
Each seat should get 1 question from each of the non-ascending quads #13-15.
No seat should get more than 1 question of any quad.
At no point in the quiz should two consecutive questions belong to the same quad.
Soft constraints:
No seat should get 3 consecutive L4s.
The last few questions of the quiz should be L2s and L3s, to increase the likelihood of a close finish.
As much as possible, quads should be evenly distributed across the quiz.
This distribution is a one-time effort to make and can be reused. There are some problems: Quad #2 ends too early, #3 starts too late, and most annoying of all, questions 13.3 and 13.2 appear too close together. But honestly, that stuff doesn't matter enough to warrant a significant change.
If you want to edit this distribution, this table is where you should do it. Note that the constraints aren’t actually encoded into the Sheet, so you’ll need to keep track of that stuff yourself.
Writing Questions
Questions and answer go into the sheet titled “Questions”. There’s some sample data in that sheet already, mostly to give examples of formatting. You can delete all of that and replace with your own content.
Selecting topics for your quads is a very subjective process, and advice for writing good questions is far beyond the scope of this post. I’ll only add that it usually helps to keep your questions less than 60 words long. At a stretch, 70. People will usually start grumbling at 80.
To start off, delete everything in the blue cells on sheet 1, and replace with the categories and quads you want to use for your quiz. You can always move them around later (you’ll probably have to once you see how the ordering of questions is affected by the quad serial number), but it’s good to make a list of quads anyway just to begin with.
Ordering
As you start entering your questions into Questions sheet, you’ll notice that the question levels are often out of order. For example, quad #2 has its levels arranged like this: L2, L3, L1, L4. This order corresponds to the way the questions actually appear in the final question set.
It’s useful to view your quads this way because that’s how the participants are going to see them, and also because it opens up a few more opportunities. While most quads in Mimir quizzes comprise of 4 standalone questions, some quads rely on the incremental revealing of information to make better questions. Using this technique can also result in a quad feeling more like a single cohesive narrative, rather than 4 arbitrary members of a list. More thoughts about this here: List Quads vs Deep Quads.
The most common example of strict ordering in a quad is when the quad name itself is an answer to one of the questions. An example can be seen in Quad #2 in the template sheet, Led Zeppelin X LotR. The question with answer ‘Led Zeppelin’ necessarily had to come first in the quiz, even if it wasn’t the L1.
Similarly, see this quad on Pronoun Books.
Here the questions are seemingly standalone, but the L4 appearing at the end becomes slightly easier because by that point the players have seen the other 3 answers and might have picked up on the ‘pronoun’ hint.
Whether or not your quad is ordered, you usually want to put a “quad intro” sentence in the first-appearing question, just so the players know what they’re dealing with.
Do not edit A, D, and E in the Questions sheet. These are the cells used to look up questions according to the distribution in Sheet 1, so changing the values will reorder the questions in the final TSV, and possibly result in duplicates. You should see a warning if you try to edit those values.
Question Formatting
Questions are often aided by the use of some markdown for formatting, although they do made the TSV uglier for direct use by readers.
The simplest example is to use bold text to indicate the operation part of the question. This is particularly useful when the question is long, since it gives players an easy way to remember what’s actually being asked in an 80-word question. Text can be made bold by **surrounding it with double asterisks.**
A few months ago ZQL started using italics as a means for providing additional, sideways clues to a question. For a variety of reasons I quite dislike this, but plenty of other setters (including some in the B612 team!) enjoy it, so you should explore it too for your quiz. Text can be made italic by *surrounding it with single asterisk.*
Finally, multiline questions don’t render automatically on wikiquiz. You can insert all the newlines you want into the question text, and the plugin will happily ignore them. If you really need a newline, using the <br> tag. Use it multiple times for multiple blank lines.
There’s an example that combines all of these in the Creator template under Quad #2, Led Zeppelin. In it, the operational part of the question is made bold, song lyrics are made italic, and newlines are used for better formatting the lyrics in the verse.
Question Media
Mimir questions are usually shorter and more concise than the questions you might be used to in open quizzes conducted using slideshows. For a long time, they were text-only as well, since questions had to be copy-pasted into the chat.
The FLQL Display Questions plugin changed all that, since questions now appeared on screen, and with that it became possible to add media too.
Mimir’s Well recently did a Facebook survey to decide whether to use images or not, and going through that discussion will give you two completely opposite arguments about how images should be used in a question. Some say images should add something to the question and not just be used “for the sake of it”. Others say that images make the quiz less accessible, and tend towards questions that boil down to “identify this actor”.
Use your judgement for this kind of thing. A useless image is probably still better than a necessary one.
Questions with Images
The easiest and most common way of using media in a question is to just throw in an image. The plugin supports images, so there’s an easy way to do it. Put the image URL in the URL column of the Questions sheet, and you’re done.
The URL should be a direct one, meaning it should link to the image asset directly and not the webpage where the image is visible. On most websites you can right click on an image and copy the image address, which is the direct image URL ending with “.jpeg” or a similar image extension.
It is good practice to host the image yourself before using it in a quiz. If you use a URL that points to another website, you’re effectively adding a dependency, so if the website goes down (or is inaccessible for the reader) or reorganizes its data, your quiz will stop working as expected. Additionally, the image URL can sometimes contain hints that you don’t want players to see, and readers should have the ability to expand images in new tabs (exposing the URL) or simply send the image URL on chat if they need to.
To handle all this, first upload all your images to a hosting website like Imgur, then copy the image links from there.
Questions with Video
The Display Questions plugin has no support for anything other than images, so for other media like videos, you’ll need to write a bit of HTML.
Add this line to your question, after the question text, to insert a video into the question.
<br><br><video controls src="https://i.imgur.com/JKSIDdm.mp4">Every character here is important, so make sure you get it right.
The <br> tags in the beginning add some space between the question text and the video player. This just looks nicer IMO.
“video control src” are all keywords, don’t change any of that. Leave the quotes around the URL too.
The video link itself is similar to the image link used in image question. It has to be a direct link (ending with .mp4 or similar extension). Again, best practice is to put your videos on Imgur first before using them in a quiz.
There are some examples in the Creator template under Quad #1, Sampling in Music.
Questions with Audio
Although you can do audio in a question in much the same way as video, by simply replacing the “video” keyword with “audio”, I really wouldn’t recommend it. This is because my own favoured hosting site, Imgur, has no support for hosting audio clips. It can do images and video, but not audio.
There are alternatives of course, but nothing looks particularly easy and reliable. There’s JukeHost which we used for a bit, but it went down once or twice during last season’s quizzes, and that’s annoying. There’s always AWS, which is wild overkill and honestly very painful to use for something as simple as writing a question. Downtimes and AWS, sigh. This is supposed to be a quiz, not a Bangalore startup.
Skip audio. Pick between image and video.
Answers with Images
Similar to inserting videos, you’ll need to write the same HTML, replacing the “video” keyword with “img”
.There’s an example in the Creator template under Quad #3, L2, image for “She”.
On Categories
The content in the Quad Category column is never actually visible to the players. It serves only as a tool for you to know the kind of topics your quiz is covering. My advice would be to make an initial list of categories when you are first gathering your quads, but feel free to ignore it when you are close to finalizing the set. At that point, you should care more about which quads are actually fun to play, and less about whether you have enough of each.
It is common in most quiz leagues to use the WQC list of categories, but that classification does have some problems. My personal issue with it is that there's too high an overlap between the categories of Culture, Lifestyle and World, and the use of only one Ent category tends to make the quiz a bit high-brow.
B612 uses its own classification (seen in the Creator Template), which separates Cine and Music, and makes F&B a separate category. But we'll be the first to admit that our classification isn't perfect either. Specifically, we often find "internet culture" topics very hard to classify accurately, and using a single "Social Sciences" umbrella sometimes causes us to miss out on either History or Geography.
Seat Calibration
In spite of all this tagging of questions and quads, there may still be significant differences between the difficulty of the 4 seats in a quiz. Your best and most foolproof way of identifying such imbalance is by simply playtesting. Try your set on your friends first. Even if you just do one quiz, reading the questions out loud will immediately make it clear which clues work and which don’t.
In addition to playtesting, another tool for calibration is the non-ascending quads, which do not have fixed difficulty levels. You can rearrange them as needed until the 4 seats seem roughly balanced.
Use Sheet 4, titled Seat Calibration, to get a quick view of the answer you’re expecting the player in each seat to come up with. Seeing them all together like this can reveal outliers. At B612 we sometimes (but not always) tag each question on that sheet with our own estimate of difficulty, a number between 1 and 10, and then take an average of our estimates to see whether one seat is too far off.
That makes sense for a league quiz, but I wouldn’t dream of doing it for a friendly. If you’re written us a friendly, you are already an angel and you do not owe us balanced seats. Do what you can, and let the players deal with the rest.
Question Files
Once you’re done adding the questions, you can export the final question set by downloading the TSV sheet as a .tsv file. This is the only file actually needed to run a quiz.
Things get easier for reader if you give them a separate PDF answer key, with additional notes about questions and prompts. You can either download the same sheet as a PDF, or create a new one with prettier formatting.
A PDF is also a nice way to attach your own names to the question, give credit to other writers (maybe even this blog post? Maybe?), and share any additional context you want to tell readers before the game. Your thoughts behind the set, or even some special instructions. For example, you might request that the set be played only if there’s at least one player in the group who identifies as female. Slightly silly idea, I know, and plenty of people will happily ignore you. But some groups of 3 might go out of their way to involve a new quizzer, and that alone will be worth it!
Tell people about your set
A real problem with friendlies is that they never see the volume of play that any league set does. To give your set the best shot at seeing gameplay, make sure you post it in a bunch of league forums. The FLQL Facebook Group probably has the most international players (and thus the widest reach), and the B612 Whatsapp group sees the most friendlies getting scheduled, so definitely post on these two places. Post on other Facebook groups like ZQL and Quizzers too if you want to go all out.
Password Protection
If you’d like to, you can combine the TSV and PDF into an encrypted zip file with a password, and you can use the last answer from the quiz as the password if you’d like to ensure that nobody can open the folder without having played the set first.
You’d really be ensuring nothing of the sort though. People who want to cheat will happily do so anyway, password or no password, so I’d skip it entirely and just share a public Google Drive folder.
That’s about everything I can think of that’s useful for writing your first friendly. I’m treating this post as a live document though, so if you think of anything else that can be added, drop a comment and I’ll do that.
Good luck with your first friendly, and please do share what you create!