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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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I am definitely a proponent of the idea of the right game for the right setting. The perfect game for one group of people at one particular time and place could be a miserable experience for someone else. Heck, even the same game with the same group of people but at the wrong time and place can still be a bad time. I’m the kind of guy who will play most anything so I try to make sure that the games that hit the table are the ones that will the folks at the table the most fun.
Despite that fact, I am still shocked to find myself going to a weekly trivia contest.
I’m not a party game kind of person in general. While I’ll play party games, I have very few in my collection and they are not what interests me in gaming. I like strategy and tactics and systems that make my brain go bing! Party games just don’t offer me that.
And trivia games are probably my least favorite form of party games. I like to learn how to play games better, to improve my tactics and strategy. With trivia games, either you know it or you don’t. Yes, that’s not quite fair. You can learn how a particular system will ask questions (Tri-Bond for instance) and you can definitely learn how to make better educated guesses. However, that’s not the same as figuring out how to optimize train freight or manage money in an auction or crush your enemies and drive them before you while listening to the lamentations of their women/men.
So how have I ended up spending so much time with trivia questions?
Pub Quiz.
Which is just what it sounds like. You go to a drinking establishment and answer trivia questions. Some places there are prizes and some places you just get to feel smart.
My fiancée and I have started to go to Pub Quiz nights. Really, for all intents and purposes, it’s just a way to add a little bit of structure to drinking with your friends. There isn’t an international, standardized format to Pub Quiz, which I had half-expected there to be. Every place has its own rules and formats and its own questions.
And, I find that I quite like it. Neither of us is much of a drinker so this lets us add some more social to our social drinking. Plus, there’s not going to be a lengthy lull in the conversation since you’ll always have more questions to discuss or curse how you got them wrong.
To be honest, I don’t think of Pub Quiz as being a game per se. I don’t go home thinking that I’ve had a night of gaming. I go home thinking that I’ve hung out with a different group of friends.
Still, board games have still managed to sneak in. In order to practice my trivia skills, I ended up downloading Trivial Pursuit onto my phone so we could play it at restaurants or on public transportation. I view it as a game that deserves the scorn Monopoly gets. It adds a die roll that helps prolong the game along with a tendency to cram popular culture into the history, geography and science categories. I view Trivial Pursuit as the kind of game that insults the intelligence of the lowest common denominator.
But it was cheap and available for my not-so-smart phone and it has improved my Pub Quiz game. And if I completely bomb in a game of Trivial Pursuit, I can always blame the dubious game design 
What have I learned from this? First of all, that trivia questions can be fun if you’re with a group of friends and drinking. Second, Trivial Pursuit is still a dreadful game
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