Venetian

Venetian is a bonus-only individual format developed by Owen Riley in 2023. Its structure of cycling directed questions to each player is analogous the system used in other trivia formats like OQL.

Sammarinese is a variation on the format developed by Conor Thompson that involves 30 questions played between teams of two instead.

Rules

Rounds of Venetian involve five bonuses being read to each of the four players, meaning it can be played with standard packets. Each round, players can choose to be read a question from one of the five categories:

• 4 history
• 4 literature
• 5 science
• 5 modern world (3 pop culture, 1 geography, 1 current events)
• 5 thought and art (2 fine arts, 1 religion, 1 myth, 1 philosophy or social science).

The number of rounds introduces the complication of it not being possible to fairly divide the "seats" between each player, something that is typically handled by having the number of rounds be a multiple of the number of players. To resolve this, the order of first four rounds is distributed fairly and the order of fifth and final round is chosen by players in order of their performance in the first four.

	1	2	3	4	5
Player 1	1 (q1)	3 (q7)	2 (q10)	4 (q16)	by seeding
Player 2	2 (q2)	4 (q8)	3 (q11)	1 (q13)
Player 3	3 (q3)	1 (q5)	4 (q12)	2 (q14)
Player 4	4 (q4)	2 (q6)	1 (q9)	3 (q15)

There are two "mechanics" in Venetian that differentiate it from conventional quiz bowl:

• after hearing the lead-in, the active player can go "double or nothing": if they 30 the bonus they will receive 60 points, but if they score anything else they will receive 0. This can be done any number of times.
• after hearing the lead-in, any player can "mulligan" to force the active player to hear a different bonus (which will become available for other players). Additionally, it is possible to "mulligan" a "mulligan" to ensure that the active player hears the original question. It is only possible to "mulligan" (or cancel a mulligan) once per game.

Past results

Date	Format