KVN proved so popular that, as in Odessa, people quickly established leagues in their own cities. In the mid-1960s Komsomol leader Olga Bondaletiva from Belgorod wrote to KVN's producers in Moscow, saying,

Dear comrades! We have a big favor to ask you. The thing is, that we have decided to organize KVN. And there's the problem. We very much want to do it well. That, of course, is not the problem. The problem is that we don't know where to start (Gal'perina 1967a, 9).

Students from Rostov-na-Don also wrote in to request materials (Gal'perina 1967, 5). In KVN Answers Letters, KVN editor Elena Gal'perina re-printed some of this correspondence and offered responses. In addition to concrete advice about the content and duration of KVN skit segments, she wrote about KVN's value system: "KVN is a competition. But it is also an intellectual battle and a cheerful scramble" (Gal'perina 1967b, 73). Gal'perina noted that KVN's main importance was as "intellectual gymnastics" rather than the quest for a trophy, observing, "So the jury messed up. So today our folks lost—they'll win tomorrow! Surely it is not a total calamity" (Gal'perina 1967a,  73).

In the 1960s televised games featured more tasks—such as guessing the number of centimeters the newspaper Pravda measured—than jokes or even skits. The live, improvised nature of some of these sequences added interest for the audience. But it also meant that performers and judges often had to figure out what to do as they went along. One competitor in the 1960s, for instance, never made his way out of a "maze race." The show's hosts, Aleksandr Masliakov and Svetlana Zhil'tsova, stood by with the other competitors on the stage, trying to offer witty commentary as the young man struggled. In the 1965 finals match, featuring Friazino and the St. Petersburg factory team Banner of Labor (Znamya Truda), teams competed to untangle balled-up audio tape, thread it onto reels, then play it. The show's organizers had gnarled the tape into the kind of mess only cats and toddlers usually engineer. After three not terribly entertaining minutes, neither team had unraveled the tape.

The 1965 game also featured a complicated dress-up game on a large spinning platform. A series of costumes hanging on racks spun around, offering teams an initial glimpse of the costumes and giving them a chance to confer about what literary figure the costumes represented. Then the platform stopped and a representative from each team went up to look more closely at the clothes. When a young man from Friazino tried to remove a rough woolen wrap from its hanger, Masliakov stopped him with, "No, no, no. You don't need to take them off the hangers. Everything is in sight." The two competitors, from Friazino and St. Petersburg, then whispered their guesses about the personage depicted by the costume into Masliakov's ear. "And so, both teams think that this is the costume of Odysseus," he responded. "Absolutely right. Each team gets one point." Then, in a set of instructions increasingly reminiscent of Calvinball rules, Masliakov told the two students to put the costumes on. The game went on like this for a little over five minutes, with contestants guessing the costumes of Little Red Riding Hood, Jacques Paganel (a character from Jules Verne's In Search of the Castaways), and Sherlock Holmes.

After team members had put on the costumes, the emcees added an improvisational component. Competitors chose objects such as a jar of jam, a blanket, or a sword from a "store" (a set of shelves on the stage), then took turns explaining their choices and why it suited their character. Amusing responses earned the highest scores. In the YouTube comments section following this footage, viewer Sergei Sosnovskii wrote, "I, of course, don't think this is funny, but I think that every generation has their own Galustyan and Svetlakov [famous contemporary KVNshiki]. Our grandfathers sincerely laughed and found joy in this humor."

Like Sosnovskii, most people today wouldn't class games like those described above as comedy. And they no longer feature in contemporary KVN. They were, however, "cheerful" and required some cleverness. The game also called for more mental dexterity than traditional quiz shows; competitors needed a solid grasp of history and literature, true, but they also had to have acting, improvisational skills, and musical ability. Why, though, would intellectual gymnastics gain such traction across the Soviet Union? What structural conditions in the USSR spurred KVN's success? Why did young people take KVN from the television screen into their own universities? There are three main reasons the improv-vaudeville-party game mishmash known as KVN became—and remains—so terribly popular in the former Soviet Union. First, it aligned with the intellectual values pushed by the Party in nearly every sphere of everyday life—schools, workplaces, clubs, mass media. Second, KVN drew on pre-existing, even pre-revolutionary, student theater traditions. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) actively contacted Komsomol cells outside of Moscow and Petersburg to help set up the game in local communities. This support was vital not only to the spread of KVN, but to its institutional durability now, more than fifty years later.