Submit Your Cheat Sheets to Water Cooler

(If you are not familiar with what a Cheat Sheet is, head over to TED Games and play a couple rounds to get a feel for how they work.)

A Cheat Sheet will be a collaboration between you and our staff of editors, who will seek to preserve your voice while making the Cheat Sheet as enjoyable as possible for our players. This page of guidelines is a living document and reflects our current best practices on Cheat Sheet creation.

A summary of what we look for:‍

At the core of each Cheat Sheet is a top-level question, which the player has to answer correctly to win the game. Given that this question is vital to gameplay, it is imperative that is accessible and interesting to nearly 100% of people who play the game.

Before thinking about the words being obscured, you should ask yourself A) Would almost every trivia-interested adult in the world be able to answer this question correctly? and B) Would people be interested in the question and answer pair?

Some unsatisfactory examples:

After coming up with your question, you're going to want to select the three words that are going to be "clues" for sub-questions.

Remember that we automatically reveal short, helper words like articles, conjunctions, and preopostions. So for all the meatier words, they will either be "clues" or redacted.

When selecting the words to be clues, remember that they themselves are going to be the answers to additional trivia questions. You'll want to pick three words that give you an appropraite amount of revelation with regard to the top-question while maximizing your ability to create compelling sub-questions.

Clues can be multiple words, especially when they are a proper noun.

Now that you have your top-level question and your three clues, you need to create three sub-questions whose answer is each of the clues respectively.

This is arguably the most difficult part of creating a Cheat Sheet as these questions have four criteria that they need to satisfy:

This is likely the part of the exercise that will take the most time, as we will be particularly technical in our evalaution of these questions.

After selecting your three level one sub-questions, you'll need to select two words from each of them repsectively to act as clues and therefore be the answer to level two sub-questions.
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At this point, you should have six clues. Two each from the level onesub-questions. You will need to draft level two sub-questions for which their respective answers are these words.

This part should be fairly straightforward, as these six questions are just standard trivia crafting. The most common pitfall is people making them too difficult.
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Basic Rules

For each Cheat Sheet, you will need to submit ten questions, correct answers / clues, and answer citations (if neccesary).

Question text

All of our questions are simple strings. We do support some special characters, but not very many.

Canonical Answer

This is the answer that will be displayed as the clue in the higher level questions. It should be the “most right” answer.

Other Possible Answers

In many cases, there will be more than one version of an acceptable answer.

If the correct answer, for example, is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then there will be many, many possible correct answers: FDR, Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, etc.

While we hope that you can help us with the other possible answers, it’s much more important when a question’s possible correct answers are very different. For example, if the correct answer to the question is “Firefly,” you’ll want to let us know that “Lightning Bug” and “Glowworm” are possible correct answers as well.

Answer Citation

Please cite your sources for us if the question is even close to being something not everyone would know.

Question Count

‍All cheat sheets are ten questions. We encourage you to submit more than ten questions if you think there are other questions that could work better than the ones you've selected for your game. Our editors will have opinions about which questions will work best for our players.

Rights

‍Cheat Sheets and the questions included must have never have been published anywhere before, either in print or electronically. Water Cooler Trivia buys all rights, including first rights.

You are allowed to have used these questions with your friends, family, or community not in exchange for compensation prior to submitting the questions to Water Cooler.

Payment

‍Payment varies based on the number of puzzles you’ve had accepted by Water Cooler Trivia.

Accepted 1-5: $25/accepted game
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Accepted 6+: $50/accepted game

Cheat Sheet Template

We've created a submission template, which can be found here. We strongly recommend submitting your Cheat Sheet in this format as it increases your chances of being accepted, however, we will accept them in other formats.

If you desire to submit multiple, we strongly prefer that you create individual submissions for each Cheat Sheet.