How to Write Great Family Feud Survey Questions (With Examples)

A great survey question feels effortless when you hear it and is surprisingly hard to write. It has to be open enough that a hundred people would give different answers, closed enough that those answers cluster into a handful of clear winners, and neutral enough that nobody feels excluded. Whether you are writing questions for a party, a classroom, or a custom round on Friendly Feud, the same rules apply. Browse our library of free survey questions for reference boards as you read.

What makes a question work

• It has many plausible answers. “Name something you keep in your car” works; “What colour is the sky?” does not.
• The answers cluster. Ask a hundred people what they keep in their car and you get five or six big groups (sunglasses, phone charger, tissues, water, snacks) plus a long tail. That cluster is your board.
• One answer is clearly the favourite. A board with a 40-point top answer and a 5-point bottom answer is fun; a board where every answer is worth 15 is flat.
• Anyone can play it. No specialist knowledge, no age-specific references, no trick wording.

The “Name something…” formula

Most classic survey questions follow one of a few templates. Start with these and you will rarely go wrong:

• Name something (people do / you find / that happens) … — “Name something people do in the shower.”
• Name a reason … — “Name a reason you might be late for work.”
• Name a place where … — “Name a place where people whisper.”
• Besides X, name … — “Besides milk, name a popular dairy product.” The “besides” clause removes the one answer that would dominate the board.
• If X, what would … — “If your cat could talk, name something it would ask for.” Hypotheticals produce the funniest boards.

How many answers, and how to score them

Aim for four to eight answers per board. Fewer than four makes the Playing phase trivial; more than eight drags. Point values should add up to roughly 100 (they represent people out of a hundred) and should fall steeply: something like 38 / 22 / 16 / 12 / 7 / 5. If you can, run a real mini-survey — ask twenty friends in a group chat and count. If you cannot, rank your answers by how obvious they feel and assign a descending spread. The exact numbers matter less than the shape.

Three worked examples

Example 1 — everyday life

Question: Name something people forget to pack when they travel. Board: Toothbrush 34, Phone charger 27, Underwear 15, Sunscreen 9, Medication 8, Passport 7. Notice the shape: one dominant answer, a strong second, and a tail of small ones that make the two-strike decision interesting.

Example 2 — the “besides” trick

Question: Besides a cake, name something you see at almost every birthday party. Board: Balloons 36, Presents 24, Candles 18, Party hats 11, Games 6, Music 5. Without “besides a cake”, cake would take 70 points and the rest of the board would be dead.

Example 3 — a hypothetical

Question: If dogs could use phones, name something they would do all day. Board: Order food 31, Video-call their owner 26, Watch squirrel videos 19, Bark at notifications 13, Take selfies 11. Hypotheticals reward imagination, but the top answers are still the “obvious” jokes most people would reach for.

Mistakes that ruin a board

1. Yes/no or single-answer questions. “Do you like pizza?” has no board.
2. Trivia in disguise. “Name a capital city in South America” is a knowledge test, not a survey.
3. Ambiguous wording. “Name something hot” could mean temperature, spice or popularity; players will feel cheated whichever way you score it.
4. Overlapping answers. If “Coffee” and “Espresso” are separate slots, the judge has to guess which one a player meant. Merge them.
5. Sensitive topics. Questions about religion, politics, bodies or money can sour a friendly game fast. Keep it light.

Writing for the answer judge

On Friendly Feud, answers are matched in three layers: exact match, synonym and word-stem matching, and finally an AI judge for anything ambiguous. When you write a board, phrase each answer as the most common short form — “Watch TV” rather than “Watching television programmes” — so the first two layers catch most guesses and the AI only has to handle the unusual ones.

Or let the game write it

If you have a topic but no time, the Custom Questions option in any room (and in Solo mode) generates a survey-style board from a one-line prompt. The best prompts look like the templates above: a category plus a situation, such as “things that go wrong at a barbecue”. Read the custom topics guide for tips on getting good boards out of it.