Kansas City Trivia
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49 free Kansas City trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Kansas City trivia questions with answers. Kansas City is really two cities on one state line, and this quiz covers both. Fifty questions run from the fur-trading landing on the Missouri River to Tom Pendergast's wide-open town, the jazz clubs of 18th and Vine, Henry Perry's barbecue pit and the fountains that gave the city its official nickname. There is plenty of sport too: Lamar Hunt's move from Dallas, the Royals' two titles, Sporting KC, the record-setting noise at Arrowhead and the teams that packed up and left. The early questions are ones any local should get. Later ones dig into Walt Disney's failed Kansas City studio, the Union Station massacre, the shuttlecocks on the Nelson-Atkins lawn and why the Country Club Plaza looks like Seville. It works as a pub quiz round, a classroom warm-up on Missouri and Kansas history, or a test for anyone who claims to know their hometown. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the institutions' own pages, and the source is shown under each explanation.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Kansas City claims only Rome has more of the feature that gives it which nickname?
The City of Fountains
The City of Fountains began practically: its first fountains were 1890s drinking troughs for horses, and in 1992 the city officially added the title to its emblem.
Q 02Which Kansas City team plays its home games at Arrowhead Stadium?
The Chiefs
The Chiefs got a football-only home because the city scrapped plans for a single multi-purpose dome and built separate football and baseball stadiums side by side.
Q 03The Kansas City Royals take their name from the American Royal, which began in 1899 as what?
A cattle show
A cattle show: it opened as the National Hereford Show in a tent at the Kansas City Stockyards, and only later added the horse shows, rodeo and barbecue contest it is known for.
Q 04Which greeting-card company has been based in Kansas City since its founder arrived in 1910?
Hallmark
Hallmark began when teenager Joyce Hall stepped off a train from Nebraska carrying two shoeboxes of picture postcards to sell.
Q 05Along with brown sugar and tomatoes, which ingredient defines thick, sweet Kansas City-style barbecue sauce?
Molasses
Molasses sweetness is relatively modern: Henry Perry's original sauce was described as harsh and peppery, and the thick, sweet style only took over from the late 1970s.
Q 06Burnt ends, the Kansas City barbecue delicacy, are cut from the point of which smoked meat?
Beef brisket
Beef brisket's charred edges were once pushed aside at the counter for customers to take free, until a famous magazine rave led restaurants to start selling them.
Q 07Which political boss ran Kansas City from 1925 to 1939 and launched a future president's career?
Tom Pendergast
Tom Pendergast seized control through a 1925 city charter that reformers had written to end boss rule, and he held it until a 1939 tax-evasion case sent him to prison.
Q 08Which future president ran a Kansas City haberdashery and was elected a Jackson County judge in 1922?
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman was no courtroom judge: the county court was an administrative board, and he spent many years paying off the debts of his failed shop.
Q 09Before moving to Kansas City in 1963, Lamar Hunt's AFL team spent three seasons where?
Dallas
Dallas was home to Hunt's Texans, who won the AFL title in their third season and then moved anyway, leaving the city to the NFL's Cowboys.
Q 10Kansas City's NFL team is named for the nickname of which figure, who lured it from Texas?
Mayor H. Roe Bartle
Mayor H. Roe Bartle got the nickname as a Boy Scout executive, and after he talked owner Lamar Hunt into moving, it won out in a name-the-team contest.
Q 11Which team did Kansas City beat 23-7 in Super Bowl IV, the last before the AFL-NFL merger?
Minnesota Vikings
Minnesota Vikings were heavy favourites, so the upset evened the Super Bowl series between the two leagues at two wins each just before they merged.
Q 12Arrowhead Stadium's crowd reclaimed the record for the loudest roar in 2014 from which team's fans?
Seattle Seahawks
Seattle Seahawks fans had taken the record from Arrowhead only weeks after it was first set there, so the home crowd went back and hit 142.2 decibels against the Patriots.
Q 13Which team did the Royals beat to win the 2015 World Series?
Mets
Q 21The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum shares its 18th and Vine building with a museum devoted to what?
Jazz
Jazz fills the other half of the Museums at 18th and Vine: the American Jazz Museum keeps a working club, the Blue Room, that stages live shows several nights a week.
Q 22Which future Brooklyn Dodger played shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs in 1945?
Jackie Robinson
Jackie Robinson played only that one season for the Monarchs before Branch Rickey chose him as the player who would integrate the major leagues with Brooklyn.
Q 23Which cartoonist ran Kansas City's Laugh-O-Gram Studio until it went bankrupt in 1923?
Walt Disney
The Mets lost in five games, and the clincher needed twelve innings before the Royals broke it open with five runs to win 7-2.
Q 14Which pharmaceutical executive founded the Royals in 1969 and now has the ballpark named after him?
Ewing Kauffman
Ewing Kauffman first ran Marion Laboratories out of his basement, naming it with his middle name so customers would not guess it was a one-man operation.
Q 15Which major-league team played in Kansas City from 1955 to 1967 before moving to California?
The Athletics
The Athletics' move under owner Charlie Finley brought such legal pressure that the American League answered by awarding Kansas City an expansion team, the Royals, for 1969.
Q 16Under what name did Kansas City's Major League Soccer club begin play in 1996?
The Wiz
A trademark dispute turned the Wiz into the Wizards after one season; the club became Sporting Kansas City with its 2010 rebrand.
Q 17Which NBA franchise played in Kansas City from 1972 to 1985 before leaving for California?
The Kings
The Kings arrived from Cincinnati as the Royals, a name Kansas City's baseball team already had, so they took a new one and spent three seasons as the Kansas City-Omaha Kings.
Q 18The NHL's Kansas City Scouts moved to Denver in 1976, then east in 1982 to become which team?
New Jersey Devils
New Jersey Devils: the franchise lost so steadily in Kansas City and Denver that its first winning season came only in 1988, before it went on to win three Stanley Cups.
Q 19Which bebop pioneer, nicknamed 'Bird', was born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1920?
Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker grew up across the state line in Kansas City, Missouri, and got the name on tour with Jay McShann's band, in one telling after their car hit a chicken, a 'yardbird'.
Q 20Which pianist joined Bennie Moten's Kansas City orchestra in 1929 before leading his own famous big band?
Count Basie
Count Basie formed his own group from Moten's men after the bandleader died in 1935, and a radio broadcast from Kansas City drew producer John Hammond, who helped launch them nationally.
Walt Disney's studio went under when a distributor failed to pay for its fairy-tale cartoons, but its last film, Alice's Wonderland, became the pilot for his first Hollywood series.
Q 24Which novelist spent six months as a cub reporter at The Kansas City Star before joining the Red Cross in WWI?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway later called the paper's stylebook, which opens 'Use short sentences', the best rules he ever learned for the business of writing.
Q 25The 1933 Kansas City massacre led Congress to let agents of which agency carry guns and make arrests?
The FBI
The FBI lost an agent in the ambush, which also killed three policemen and the prisoner they were escorting; until then its men had no legal power to carry guns or make arrests.
Q 26Which Kansas City landmark, dedicated in 1926, did Congress name the country's official World War I museum in 2004?
Liberty Memorial
Liberty Memorial was paid for by the public: a 1919 fund drive raised more than $2.5 million in about ten days, and President Coolidge came to dedicate the finished tower.
Q 27Which French marshal joined Pershing and three other Allied commanders to dedicate the site of Kansas City's WWI monument in 1921?
Ferdinand Foch
Ferdinand Foch stood beside Pershing, Britain's Beatty, Italy's Diaz and Belgium's Jacques before a crowd of more than 100,000, and the monument's Dedication Wall now carries bronze portraits of all five.
Q 28The Country Club Plaza (1923) was built in Baroque and Moorish Revival style echoing which Spanish city?
Seville
Seville's Giralda tower is copied at half scale as the Plaza's tallest building, and in 1967 the resemblance became official when the two were made sister cities.
Q 29On which night each year are Kansas City's Country Club Plaza holiday lights switched on?
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving night's switch-on began as just 16 lights hung over a single doorway; the official ceremony dates from 1930, and a guest of honour now flips the switch for a crowd of thousands.
Q 30Giant sculptures of what object have stood on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art since 1994?
Shuttlecocks
Shuttlecocks: Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen imagined the museum as a badminton net and its lawn as the court, placing four birdies as though they had just landed on either side.