Dear readers, I’m in need of advice. I love Trivial Pursuit, but I have the original questions long memorized (long live Avery Brundage!), and some of my friends have the same problem with subsequent Genuses. When I went online to buy the newest edition of the game, unhappy reviews said the questions have been dumbed down significantly in recent incarnations.
I want something hard, preferably harder than the original, that’s NOT mostly pop culture. I’d rather strain my brain recalling presidents and Nobel Prize winners, not what color Madonna’s hair was in Desperately Seeking Susan.
I do like Cranium, but I want something that works well in small groups. Any other ideas – either for good editions of TP, or for other games?
A game my college computer geek friends and I used to play (perhaps one of the reasons non-nerds would not attend our parties) involved hauling my two volume version of the Oxford English Dictionary along, splitting into two teams, and choosing the one real definition out of the several invented definitions. Two fine examples of this game in practice can be found on the NPR program “Says You”, http://www.wgbh.org/radio/saysyou/, and one of my favorite blogs, “Word Imperfect”, http://wordimperfect.blogspot.com/.
Of course, part of my liking of this game may have been that, as the owner of the biggest dictionary, I had the vocabulary advantage and often won.
Yeah, that dictionary game is kind of cool, in a nerd way.
Oooh. . . . that is a very good game! Except, at the risk of sounding like a total snot, I don’t think I could get any of my friends to agree to play it with me. Now, if I had to pronounce the word correctly, instead of recognizing its definition, I’d be screwed!
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Development-Group-Inc-Board/dp/B00004W60G
There is a link to an irritating/challenging trivia game called Wit’s End. Different sorts of questions on sometimes very obscure topics. Find a cheap copy and just read from the box amongst friends.