How to make a Jeopardy game
Updated
A Jeopardy game is six categories, five clues each, and a scoreboard. The board is the easy part — most of the work is writing thirty clues that are neither trivially easy nor impossible, and having a plan for who answers first. This covers both, and it ends with the two decisions that matter most on the day.
The whole build in seven steps
Decide what the game is for
A unit review, an onboarding session and a party are three different games. A review game wants clues that map onto things you actually taught. A party wants clues most of the room has a shot at. Write this down before you write a single clue — it settles a dozen later arguments with yourself about difficulty.
Pick six categories
Six is the standard board width and it is the right number: five feels thin, seven makes the rows too long to read from the back of a room. Give each category a short name — two or three words. Long category names get truncated on screen and nobody reads them anyway.
Write five clues per category, easiest first
The value ladder is the difficulty ladder. The $200 clue should be gettable by almost everyone in the room; the $1,000 clue should be gettable by one or two people. If your $200 clue stumps the room, the game stalls in the first two minutes and never recovers.
Write the answer next to every clue
Do this while you write the clue, not afterwards. The single most common failure in a homemade board is a clue whose answer the host has to reconstruct live, in front of everyone, while somebody argues about it.
Add a Final Jeopardy clue
One clue, harder than anything on the board, with a category announced before players wager. Final is what makes the last ten minutes matter — without it, a team that is 3,000 points ahead has already won and everyone knows it.
Decide how people buzz in
This is the decision that separates a game from a worksheet. Shouting out means the loudest person wins. Hands means the host adjudicates ties. Phones as buzzers means the order is decided for you and the room can see it. Whichever you pick, decide before the game rather than during it.
Do one dry run of the first column
Read the five clues of one category out loud at the speed you will actually read them. You will find at least one clue that is ambiguous when spoken and one answer that is longer than you thought. Fix those two and the game will run.
How many clues do you actually need
A full 6 × 5 board is thirty clues plus Final Jeopardy, and it takes a group of adults about 35 to 50 minutes to play through. That is the number to plan for if you have an hour.
If you have less time, cut categories rather than rows. A 4 × 5 board still feels like Jeopardy; a 6 × 3 board loses the difficulty ladder that makes the format work, because three price points is not enough of a slope.
| Time you have | Board size | Clues to write |
|---|---|---|
| 20–25 minutes | 4 × 5, no Final | 20 |
| 35–50 minutes | 6 × 5 with Final | 31 |
| A full class or two rounds | 6 × 5 twice, values doubled in round two | 61 |
Writing a clue that plays well
The show's convention is that the clue is a statement and the response is a question. That is a style choice, not a rule, and enforcing it in a classroom mostly produces arguments about phrasing rather than knowledge. Decide up front whether you are enforcing it and say so before the first clue.
What matters far more is that each clue has exactly one defensible answer. These are the four ways a homemade clue usually goes wrong:
- Two right answers. "This element is a gas at room temperature" has about a dozen. Pin it down with a second fact.
- The answer is in the clue. If the clue says "photosynthesis converts light into", the room does not need to know anything.
- It only works written down. Homophones, spellings and anything numeric read badly out loud. Test by reading it aloud once.
- It is a definition, not a clue. "What is the capital of France" is a quiz question. "This city's Metro line 1 opened during its 1900 World's Fair" is a clue. Clues carry a fact people can hook onto.
Scoring, and the two rules people forget
Right answers add the clue's value, wrong answers subtract it. The subtraction is the whole game: without it, the correct strategy is to buzz on every clue and guess, and the fastest thumbs win regardless of what anyone knows.
The two rules that get missed: whoever answers correctly picks the next clue, which keeps a strong team from being frozen out; and a wrong answer should reopen the clue to everyone else rather than ending it, or a single early buzz kills a clue nobody got to try.
Negative scores are normal and should be allowed. A team at -400 that wagers everything on Final is one of the better things that happens in this game.
Building it: slides versus a board maker
There are two ways to end up with a playable board. You can build it in PowerPoint or Google Slides, which means a grid of shapes, a slide per clue, and a hyperlink from every square to its slide and back again — around sixty links for a full board. Or you can type the clues into a tool that already knows what a Jeopardy board is.
The slide route is free and works offline, and it is genuinely the right answer if your room has no wifi. Its real cost is not the first build but the second: changing one category means re-editing links, and no version of it gives players buzzers.
Make My Jeopardy is the other route. Type thirty clues into a grid, open the presenter view on the TV, and players join from their phones with a five-letter code — no app and no account on either end. The buzz order is decided server-side rather than by whoever shouts, and the scores keep themselves. A full 6 × 5 board with buzzers, live scoring and Final Jeopardy is free.
Common questions
How long does it take to make a Jeopardy game?
Writing thirty good clues takes most people 30 to 60 minutes if they know the material. Building the board itself takes about 40 minutes in PowerPoint or Google Slides, because of the hyperlinking, and about 15 minutes in a dedicated board maker. Starting from a ready-made board and swapping a few clues takes under five.
How many people do you need to play Jeopardy?
Three players is the show's format, but a homemade game works from two players up to a whole lecture hall as long as everyone can buzz. Above about eight, play in teams — otherwise most of the room is watching rather than playing, and the people who never buzz check out.
Do the point values have to be 200 to 1000?
No, but keep them evenly spaced and increasing, because the values are how players read difficulty before they commit. The show uses 200 through 1000 in the first round and doubles them in the second, which is worth copying if you are playing two rounds.
Can you play Jeopardy with a remote or hybrid group?
Yes. Share the presenter view over your video call and have everyone buzz from their own phone or a second tab. What breaks a remote game is buzzing by unmuting — voice delay is several hundred milliseconds and varies per person, so the buzz order ends up meaningless.
Make one now
A 6 × 5 board with phone buzzers, live scoring and Final Jeopardy — free, no account. Or copy a ready-made board.
Keep reading
How to make a Jeopardy game in PowerPoint
The full PowerPoint method — board grid, thirty clue slides, sixty hyperlinks, trigger reveals — plus the three things a slide deck cannot do.
Jeopardy rules, scoring and wagering
The rules of Jeopardy for running your own game: board layout, scoring, Daily Double and Final Jeopardy wagers, and which rules to drop.
How to give everyone a buzzer
The four ways to run buzz-in — shouting, hands, hardware buzzer sets and phones — and what each costs in fairness, setup time and arguments.