Child Of The 1980's

Of all the boardgames to appear during the 1980’s, Trivial Pursuit has got to be the most enduring and best known. Everyone must surely have played it at some point, and therefore experienced the seemingly unending chase around the board to get your last wedge. The drawn out end game must surely be the games downfall, and the reason why when anybody suggests playing a game they are normally met with a series of groaned responses of the “Can’t we play something else” variety.

Trivial Pursuit: Genus Edition appeared in 1982, although it’s amazing how many people thought the game was called Trivial Pursuits: Genius Edition. If you haven’t played it (unlikely) then the object of the game is to move around the board answering trivia questions and filling your counter with little wedges in six different colours. Once you had filled your counter you then had to head for the centre of the board, where your fellow players would get to choose the category they wanted to ask you. Get this question right and you won the game. The colours of the wedges referred to the different types of questions, which for the Genus edition were:-

• Blue – Geography
• Pink – Entertainment
• Yellow – History
• Brown – Art and Literature
• Green – Science and Nature
• Orange – Sports and Leisure

The game has since appeared in more than 30 different versions, including those for different decades (perhaps I should get the 1980s version myself, purely for research purposes you understand), plus Disney, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Warner Brothers editions and many more on top of that. All told around 88 million copies have been sold over the years.

Probably the worst thing about Trivial Pursuit is when you are playing it with someone who is a stickler for the rules. Most people will be prepared to start skipping certain rules to speed up the game, for example by allowing any square on the board to yield a wedge if the question is answered correctly, or allowing the player to choose their own question when landing on the centre space to try and win the game.

The worst people though are those who say that the exact answer on the card must be given otherwise the wedge won’t be awarded. This may not seem so bad in itself, but given that some of the answers on the cards are actually wrong (or have since become wrong due to the passage of time) this can be extremely irritating.

Search for Trivial Pursuit items on Amazon.co.uk

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This entry is filed under Toys - Boardgames and was posted on February 27th, 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.