Why draw the categories instead of printing a running order?
Because whatever order you print, somebody will say it suited a team. Music before the drinks arrive, sport at the point where two players have gone home — a fixed order is a set of small decisions the host made alone, and the teams know it. Drawing the round takes those decisions off you and puts them in front of everybody.
It also stops teams pacing themselves. A printed sheet tells a strong history team exactly when to concentrate; a drawn order tells them nothing until the round starts. The quiz keeps the whole room for the whole night, which is the thing a host is really trying to buy.
How many rounds does a quiz night actually need?
Six, at ten questions each, is where most nights sit. A round of ten takes twelve to fifteen minutes to ask, answer and mark, so six rounds plus a break and the scoring is a little over two hours — long enough to be an evening, short enough that the last round is still played properly.
Past eight rounds the room thins out before the scores are read, and the marking becomes the event. If you want more variety rather than more quiz, make the rounds themselves different — a picture round, a music round, one where every answer is from the same year — instead of adding a seventh.
How do you stop one team’s specialist subject deciding the night?
Spread the categories before anything is drawn. Six rounds that are all recall — history, geography, science — hand the night to whoever reads most. One round that rewards being quick, one that rewards being old and one that rewards being young keep more than one team in it past halfway.
If a category has to be there but should not decide anything, give it a smaller weight so it is less likely to come up early; elimination still brings it round before the end. Or keep one round off the wheel entirely as a tie-break, and draw it the same way if you need it. A tie-break drawn like everything else is a tie-break nobody argues about.
What else is this wheel good for?
It is the plain picker wheel with your rounds on it and elimination on. Where the rounds are numbered on a sheet rather than named on a rim, the number wheel draws the number and you read out what it stands for.
The other job where a room watches you draw is calling bingo numbers, which is this wheel with a range on it instead of names. A wheel of questions for a group that has not met yet is an icebreaker.