Recently the Puzzled Pint Game Control groups across several cities have had behind-the-scenes discussions about bar booking strategies. As the number of attendees increases, it becomes increasingly more difficult to find friendly and compatible bars. A few cities have dealt with this by constantly using the same bar or cycling through two or three “home bars.” A few others, such as London and Portland, have split Puzzled Pint into two arbitrary groups.
Because most cities try to find new bars each month, we’re always contacting somone who is new to Puzzled Pint. We find a lot of bars misunderstand Puzzled Pint initially. They’ve never heard of it and want GC to reserve a private room or put down a several hundred dollar deposit to guarantee that the players purchase a minimum amount for the evening. We instead try to frame Puzzled Pint more like a trivia night without an MC. It’s a bunch of people eating, drinking, socializing, and solving puzzles. It looks like a regular night to them, albeit a busy one — so it would be helpful to have a few extra folks on staff, but we need no other special treatment.
We thought it would be helpful to share some purchasing stats from around the world. In March, the Question of the Month we presented on the answer sheet asked how much your team spent that evening on food and drink. Not all teams responded, but I’ve noted the count of teams that did.
| City | Teams Reporting | Average | Median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Austin | 15 (of 21) | $43.13 | $45.00 |
| Bay Area — Peninsula | 11 (of 26) | $76.73 | $80.00 |
| Bay Area — San Francisco | 4 (of 13) | $20.25 | $20.50 |
| Brooklyn | 2 (of 5) | $28.00 | $28.00 |
| Chicago | 16 (of 24) | $22.19 | $21.25 |
| Phoenix | 2 (of 5) | $45.00 | $45.00 |
| Pittsburgh | 1 (of 9) | $65.00 | $65.00 |
| Portland | 20 (of 24) | $56.80 | $50.00 |
| Seattle – City | 18 (of 20) | $80.28 | $72.50 |
| Seattle – East | 26 (of 32) | $61.92 | $60.00 |
| Montreal | 4 (of 4) | $81.25 | $77.50 |
| Toronto | 4 (of 10) | $61.25 | $52.50 |
| London | 10 (of 21) | £56.70 | £50.00 |
That the average and median of each city are so close together shows that the average is pretty accurate for that city. There aren’t outliers skewing the average. If you’re a numbers nerd and want to do other sorts of analysis, you can find a read-only version of the source spreadsheet on Google Docs.
City Game Control: Feel free to point bar managers to these statistics.
Players: Don’t forget to generously tip the waitstaff.
I’ll have to double check later, but I’m pretty sure Chicago’s data is per person, not team based on the stats you have in the article. When we have a location that serves food, most of our puzzlers order dinner at the event.
Yeah, this would have been a more useful analysis per person, instead of per team…