Organizing Categories

Categories are the columns on the Categories game board — the subject headings students choose from. Getting them right is most of what makes a Categories game work.

This article is about the Categories format specifically. Other formats don’t use categories.

The Structure

A Categories board is a grid. Each column is a category with a name at the top. Each row down that column is a question of increasing point value.

Students pick a category and a value, you reveal the clue, they answer.

Choosing Categories

Make them mean something. Categories should divide your material along lines students recognize — topics, phases of a process, document types, chronology. Arbitrary groupings make the board feel random.

Keep names short. They sit as column headers on a projected board. Two or three words reads from the back of the room; a full sentence doesn’t.

Make them distinct. If two categories overlap heavily, students can’t predict what a square will ask, and the strategic element of choosing disappears.

Consider a wildcard. One looser category — “Odds and Ends”, “Definitions”, “Common Mistakes” — absorbs good questions that don’t fit elsewhere.

Ordering Questions Within a Category

Point values should track difficulty. The low-value square in a category should be answerable by anyone who did the reading; the high-value square should require real command of the material.

This matters more than it sounds. If difficulty doesn’t track value, teams learn that choosing is meaningless and the game flattens into a quiz.

Balancing the Board

Keep categories comparable in difficulty. If one column is much harder, teams avoid it and you never cover that material.

Spread the important material. Anything you genuinely need students to know should appear somewhere in the low and middle rows, not only in the hardest square — high-value squares often go unplayed.

Cover the whole unit. The board is your review; anything absent from it is material you’ve implicitly told students not to study.

Editing Categories

Open the game’s editor. Category names and their questions are edited in place. Add, rename, and remove as needed, then save.

Importing a CSV replaces all categories and questions at once. See CSV Import Guide.

Building from a CSV

For Categories, the sample CSV shows the expected layout: category name, the clue, the expected response, and the point value.

Building the board in a spreadsheet is usually faster than in the editor, because you can see the whole grid at once and spot gaps in coverage or difficulty that aren’t obvious one row at a time.

A Practical Workflow

1. List the topics your unit covers
2. Group them into category-sized buckets
3. For each bucket, write questions from easy to hard
4. Lay it out in the sample spreadsheet
5. Read the whole board and check: does every column have a real progression, and does the board cover the unit?
6. Import and save

Next Steps

• Categories (in the Categories channel) — full setup and running guide
• CSV Import Guide — bulk loading a board
• Team Management — team scoring in Categories