Stack Up

How to play Stack Up

Stack Up is the team quiz where a correct answer isn't enough: you need the one that's worth the most. Pick a category, for example “City Population”, and five items appear, such as Spain, Japan or Brazil. For each one, both teams write an answer: for Spain one team writes “Barcelona”, the other “Madrid”. The game recognises the answers, shows their value (each city's population) and adds it to the total. After five items, the highest stack wins the round.

Step-by-step rules

1. Choose how many rounds you need to win: 3, 5 or no limit. With more than two teams in the panel, you can choose who faces whom.
2. Pick one of the 19 categories, or let 🎲 choose one at random.
3. For each item, both teams secretly type their answer, then press “Reveal”.
4. The game looks each answer up and shows its value with an animated count. An answer that isn't on the list is worth zero, unless the host fixes it.
5. After 5 items the summary appears: the highest total wins the round and scores +1 point on the leaderboard.
6. The first team to reach the agreed number of rounds wins Stack Up.

The categories

City and country populations, country and island areas, river lengths, the height of skyscrapers and mountains, the speed of animals and vehicles, animal weights, food calories, box office takings, IMDb ratings, film lengths, stadium capacities, sports trophies, social media followers, music streams and even the age and height of famous people. In total there are more than 130 items and over 2,000 valid answers.

How answers are recognised

You don't need perfect spelling. The game ignores capitals, accents and leading articles, accepts shortened words (“Japa”) and small typos (“Barcelone”), and understands Italian names too (“Londra” counts as London). If an answer is valid but not on the list, or a value looks wrong, the host can use “Fix”. They can match the answer to an entry on the list or type a value by hand, even as “1.6M” or “185k”. The fix can be remembered on the device for future games.

Strategy

• Go for the big hitters: the capital isn't always the most populous city, but it's often the safest bet.
• Mind the gamble: a very high but wrong answer is worth zero and hands the round to your rivals.
• Agree as a team: only type the answer once everyone agrees, and keep it hidden from the other side.

Frequently asked questions