Hosting

Write your own quests

Our packs are a warm-up. The quests people quote back to you a week later are the ones you wrote about them.

3 September 2026 · 5 min read

A pack quest is good. Get someone to teach you a dance move works at any party on earth, which is exactly its limitation — it works at any party on earth. Nobody screenshots it.

Get Marcus to tell the boat story again is a different animal. Everyone at that party knows about the boat story. Everyone knows Marcus needs about four seconds of encouragement. The quest is funny before anyone completes it, and when someone does, the whole room is in on it.

That is the whole argument for writing your own. Five minutes of work beforehand, and your party gets a private layer that no pack can reach.

What makes a good one

Four rules cover almost everything.

Name names. The best quests point at somebody. Get Priya to admit she has seen the film lands harder than get someone to admit something.

Make it something you do, not something you say. A quest should send the player across the room. Get someone to bring you a bar of soap is ridiculous and very hard to fake. Think of a funny memory is not a quest.

Someone has to be able to confirm it. SideQuest runs on peer verification — the player picks whoever saw it happen and asks them to approve. If nobody could have witnessed it, it does not work.

Price it honestly. Ten points for something that takes one sentence. A hundred for something you genuinely might not pull off all night. If everything is worth 25, nothing feels worth chasing.

A list to steal

Here is a ready-made set. It is deliberately mixed: a few you will finish in the first twenty minutes, two that might beat you entirely. Copy the whole block — the format is exactly what SideQuest reads.

Convince someone that Mount Everest is no longer the tallest mountain in the world - 25 points
Convince someone that smiling for 30 minutes straight is healthy - 25 points
Get someone to bring you a bar of soap - 40 points
Get someone to give you their mum's phone number - 60 points
Find someone who knows your birthday - 10 points
Find someone whose birthday is on 29 February - 100 points
Convince someone that Michael Jordan is the GOAT - 25 points
Get a stranger at the party to scream - 25 points
Join a conversation and steer it round to Taylor Swift songs - 25 points
Get someone to pour their drink on you - 100 points

Look at the spread. The birthday one is ten points because someone will just know it. The 29 February one is a hundred because there is roughly a one in fifteen hundred chance anybody in the room qualifies — and if someone does, that is the story of the night. Soap is forty because it is easy to ask for and weirdly hard to get.

Getting them into the game

There is a page for this. From the party home screen, tap Prepare your game.

The SideQuest party home screen, showing Host a game, Join a game, Prepare your game and How to play buttons. — Third button down. You do not need a room yet — this works days before the party.

1. Paste the whole list at once

Scroll to Paste a list, drop your quests in, one per line, and press Add to my list. Numbering is fine. Pasting straight out of your notes app is fine. If a line has no points on it, it comes in at ten and you can change it after.

The Paste a list card on the Prepare your game page, with the ten sample quests filled into the text box. — Want to see it work first? **Load the sample list** fills the box with the ten above.

2. Tidy it up

Everything you have added appears at the top of the page. Change the order, delete the one that seemed funnier last night, add a couple by hand. The list saves itself in your browser as you go, so you can close the tab and come back to it on the day.

The Your quests card listing the ten imported quests with their point values, each with a reorder arrow and a remove button. — Twenty quests is the ceiling. That is plenty — you are seasoning the packs, not replacing them.

3. Keep a copy

The list lives in one browser on one device. If you are writing it on your laptop and hosting from your phone, or if a friend is doing the writing, use Copy as text and send it over. They paste it into their own Prepare page and they are holding the same list.

The Save a copy card, offering Copy as text, Download .txt and Clear the list. — Copy, download, or wipe it and start again.

4. Host the game

Press Use these in a new room. Your quests are already sitting on the hosting screen under Your own quests, mixed in with whichever packs you pick. Players will not know which quest came from where, which is the point.

The Your own quests card on the hosting screen, showing a note that ten quests were brought over from Prepare your game. — Still editable here. There is a paste box on this screen too, if you thought of one more on the way over.

Afterwards

When the game ends, the results screen has a Keep this game card. It hands you the final standings and your own quests as plain text, written in the same format the paste box reads. Copy it, keep it, and next party you start from a list that has already been tested on this exact group of people.

That is how a good list gets good. Nobody writes twenty brilliant quests on the first try. You write ten, four of them land, and those four go into the next one.

Ready to write yours? Prepare your game takes about five minutes and works days before the party. Free, no download, no sign-up — and when the night comes you share a code and everyone's in.

Prepare your game Host a game