One of the first things about Trivial Pursuit that might surprise you is that it was sold in the early 1980s. Many people think the game is much older than it really is. Chris Haney and Scott Abbott made Trivial Pursuit in Canada.
The two men were going to play Scrabble. But when they saw that some of the pieces were missing, they decided to make their own game instead. This game was meant to be a test run for what would become Trivial Pursuit.
After being worked on for a couple of years, the first Trivial Pursuit game came out in 1981. The game was published by many different companies before Hasbro bought the rights in 2008. Trivial Pursuit has also been made in many different versions.
What You’ll Need to Play Trivial Pursuit
Trivial Pursuit is still played by a lot of people, so it shouldn’t be hard to find a set. In fact, it will probably be hard to find the right set. There are deluxe editions, family sets, and many themed game boards, so it might be hard to find a standard Trivial Pursuit game board.
The Game Board
The board for Trivial Pursuit is very interesting. The best way to describe the shape is as a wheel with six spokes coming off of it. There will be a different color for each space on the board. With these colors, you can tell what the questions will be about.
A hub space is in the middle of the board. At the end of each board spoke is a space for the category headquarters. People also call these wedge spaces. The goal is to move to these squares, answer the question correctly, and get a wedge.
The Pieces/ Wedges
In Trivial Pursuit, each player will have a piece to play with. These pieces are round and have six triangle-shaped wedge holes. Your playing piece will be empty when you start.
To get wedges, you’ll have to move your piece around the board. There are six different colors of wedges, one for each type of trivia question. Your Trivial Pursuit box has 6 playing pieces and 6 wedges of each color.
The Trivia Cards
In Trivial Pursuit, players spend a lot of time picking up trivia cards and answering them correctly, if they can. Depending on the exact number, you will usually get more than 400 different trivia cards.
Each card will have a question that is easy, medium, or hard. On the back of the card, the answers to each question are written. The traditional way to play Trivial Pursuit is to roll the dice to see how hard your question will be.
If you roll a 1 or 2, the question is easy to answer. You answer the medium question if you roll a 3 or 4. And finally, you have to answer the hard question if you roll a 5 or 6.
For each color of cards, there is also a card holder that goes with it. This makes it easy to choose the right card.
The Dice
In Trivial Pursuit, you use a single dice to move. You can, however, control how it moves in a number of ways. In Trivial Pursuit, the strange shape of the board gives you more control over how you move.
When it comes to winning Trivial Pursuit, how you choose to move can make a big difference.
Setting up the Game
1. Familiarize yourself with the board’s layout
The Trivial Pursuit game board looks like a wheel with six spokes. Players start in the middle, move out to get a wedge from each of the spaces marked with wedges where a spoke meets the outer wheel, and then move back to the middle to answer the last question. On all sets except the oldest ones, there is a “Roll Again” space two spaces away from each wedge space.
Six spaces away from the center space are the wedge spaces.
2. Decide whether to play as individuals or teams
Trivial Pursuit is made for teams of up to six people. If more than six people want to play or if players don’t feel comfortable playing by themselves, you may want to divide into teams. Team play is a little less serious, and it might be fun at a party.
3. Set your house rules
Before you start playing, you should decide if there are any special rules you will follow. For instance, you might want to limit the amount of time people have to answer questions. If you do establish a time restriction, make sure you have a timer ready, or you may want to make it a rule that participants must be extremely particular in their replies, such as with names or dates.
4. Choose a playing token
There are six different-colored playing pieces. Blue, green, yellow, pink, brown, and orange are the colors. Tokens are round and have holes in them for the wedges. Put a piece for each player or team in the middle of the board.
Some versions of Trivial Pursuit have pawns for the track that are the same color as the pie pieces. You can keep track of where you are on the board with one of these track pawns, and your score with the pie token.
5. Get out the question cards
Trivial Pursuit used to come with two cardboard boxes full of questions when it was first made. If the players are split into two teams, you may want to give each team a box. If the players are split in a different way, you may want to only use one box at a time.
Playing Trivial Pursuit
1. Roll the die and move your pie as many spaces as the die says.
If your token is on a spoke, you can move it toward a wedge or toward the middle. When it is on the outer wheel, you can move it in either direction. You can also move from the outside wheel to a spoke or from a spoke to the outside wheel. But once you’re rolling, you can’t change direction.
You must roll the die once more if “Roll Again” appears on the result. (You can go in any legal direction, even the opposite of where you rolled before.)
2. Move again if your answer is right
Trivial Pursuit lets you move again if you give the right answer. You can keep going, answering questions, and rolling the dice until you get one wrong. Just remember that the answers you give to the questions have to match the color space you land on. If you land on a blue square, you have to answer a question about blue.
You can answer a question from any category if you are in the middle and don’t have all six wedges yet.
3. You get a piece of pie if you land on a wedge space and answer correctly
If you answer questions correctly, you can get pie pieces, but you can only get a piece if you are on a pie space. These spaces on the board look different from the others because they have a pie token with a wedge in it.
For example, if you landed on a brown wedge space and gave the right answer, you would get a brown pie piece.
4. Play until one person has all six wedges
When a player has all six pie pieces, that player can start moving toward the middle of the board. You must keep rolling and moving as usual until you get to the middle space on the board. To get to the middle space, you have to roll the same number of spaces as there are spaces.
Keep in mind that you might miss or go past the center a few times before you get there.
5. Answer a question from a category that the other players have chosen
When you get to the center space, other players can choose any category and ask you a question from that category. You will win the game if you provide the right response to this query. If you miss it, your turn is over and the next person or team takes over.
The other players can’t look at the questions before they choose a category. They have to pick the category without looking at the card, then read the question.
If you miss the question, you’ll have to roll again on your next turn and try to answer a different question when you get to the center space again.
Question Categories
- BLUE: Geography
- PINK: Entertainment
- YELLOW: History
- BROWN: Art & Literature
- GREEN: Science & Nature
- ORANGE: Sport & Leisure
The Aim of the Game
Trivial Pursuit is a game where the goal is to get one wedge of each color. To do this, you have to move around the board and land on each of the six wedge spaces. When you get to the wedge space, you have to answer the question correctly in order to get the colored wedge.
When you have all of the wedges, you need to move toward the hub space in the middle of the board. Once you’ve made it to the hub space, you have to answer one last question.
The people who are still playing decide what the question is about. If you give the right answer to the question, the game is over and you win. If you don’t, your turn is over and you have to wait until the next time you can try.
Conclusion
Trivial Pursuit is one of the few games that makes it fun to answer questions about general knowledge. The game is mostly a race between the people who play it. There is also a lot of room for planning. It’s a great party game, but it’s also hard and requires a lot of strategy.