Correctly answering a ChGK question (known as "taking" a question) should require one or more logical steps, intuitive search, insight, etc. Questions that require players to directly know obscure facts are perceived negatively. Further, questions that require only direct knowledge are generally considered to be outside the scope of the game.

Common techniques for writing competitive ChGK questions are omissions (finding the missing words in some text), replacements (one is required to understand which words were replaced) and handouts (usually a printed picture or text).

Depending on the design of the question, questions can be categorized as one-step and multi-step (depending on whether one or more logical steps are required to answer it), mosaics (various facts are reported about the subject of the question and players must then find the answer) and so on.

Poor quality questions include coffins (questions that are too difficult or otherwise flawed in such a way that almost no team was able to correctly answer it; however, some so-called coffins are high-quality questions), children's questions or nuts (questions that are too easy and nearly every team took it), candles or illuminated questions (which are total or partial repeats of earlier questions), dual questions (which have more than one correct answer satisfying all the facts in the question, and all of them should be counted), logical duals (which are as logical as the author's answer, but directly contradict at least one fact of the question and therefore shouldn't be counted) and finally incorrect questions (which are based on false facts; such questions can be removed if the tournament's rules allow for it)