Trivial Pursuit for multiple ages

March 27, 2023 6:51 AM

I recently spent some time playing Trivial Pursuit with my teenage granddaughters, and I would like to find a way to make that work better - whether by buying new cards or coming up with ways to revise the rules a bit. If you've figured out a way to solve the problem of multiple ages and abilities, please share.

We were playing with an old game, and it felt like the cards were really geared toward things I often knew because I was old enough to remember them. They still wanted to play, and I ended up giving very broad hints along with the questions, but it seemed suboptimal. There were so many things they just had no way of knowing.

I bought their family a trivia game called Camp that works really well because there are four levels of questions, so it's good for a wide range of ages. It's all nature questions though, and I'd like something with more kinds of categories. I know that family cards for Trivial Pursuit exist, but there's a huge difference between a twelve-year-old and a seventeen-year-old, and I don't know if those cards account for that. I also wonder if something geared toward teens is going to be video games and pop culture, which my granddaughters wouldn't know either.

So are there additional cards you'd recommend for this situation? Or you come up with a way to bend the rules to make it more fair?

posted by FencingGal to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (13 answers total)

One thing that my family did was play as "teams" - men against women, usually. They also saved the game for more "party" occasions when it was a big group. That usually helped because the more people you have, the greater the likelihood that there's someone in the group with a niche interest that would get a given question. (I personally proved to be such a "movies and TV" expert as a teenager that sometimes the guys would try to figure out how to bend the usual rules and have me on THEIR team.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:20 AM on March 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've had success playing Fifty-Fifty Trivia with mixed-age groups. In this game, each player poses one question to the group, and the goal is to come up with questions that exactly half of the group can answer -- so it's as much about knowing the other players as knowing stuff. You could use any compendium of trivia (including reference books, Wikipedia, or Trivial Pursuit cards) as a source of questions.
posted by aws17576 at 7:21 AM on March 27, 2023

There are these decade specific mini packs if you want to sub out some questions.
posted by Pretty Good Talker at 7:22 AM on March 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Trivia Pursuit has a family edition.

In my family we played it "baseball" style. Two teams (you could do more). Seven "innings". We would read the whole card. Score one run for each correct answer.

This eliminated the need for the board and rolling, which made it easier to play everywhere, and also spread the categories out evenly.
posted by dpx.mfx at 7:55 AM on March 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The original Trivial Pursuit is from something like 1982, and so a lot of the questions (especially in the pink category, arts and entertainment) will be pretty outdated for someone who's not a dedicated trivia player. There are modern card packs, and you can mix and match them to get a fairer picture. There's no reason that each player couldn't have their own card pack/question set. Or to use question difficulty as a type of handicap - the other players get to choose which pack a particular player has to answer from. When I suggest that, your thought is probably that that would make it fairer, and that's my primary motivation, but it doesn't have to be the other players'. Young people tend to find it amusing to watch older people try to answer questions about teen pop culture, for example, so the kids might ask you teen questions even if you actually know the answers because it's amusing that you know the answers. (Also a great way to demonstrate that knowledge is not generation-specific. If you can learn their trivia, they can learn yours.)

Teams are indeed the classic talent-leveler. They don't have to be even teams, either. My sister has a learning disability, so when my family would play, she and my mom would team up, while my brother and I would play individually. And, like Risk, the teams don't have to be formalized before the game starts, either; you can form alliances during the game. It all depends on the group dynamic.

I've come up with a lot of modifications because it's really hard for me to play Trivial Pursuit with non-experts. I was an A-rundle LearnedLeaguer, and unless the other players have been selected specifically for their trivia abilities, I win most games as shutouts. If you're dominating the answers from the 1982 edition, three common mods we play are choose-my-category, everyone-gets-a-pie and answer-the-whole-card. In choose-my-category, it doesn't matter what color space I land on. The other players get to choose what category my question will come from. My weakest category is science, so in practice, every space I land on is a brown space until I get the brown pie piece, and even then the only non-brown spaces are the other pie spaces. In everyone-gets-a-pie, if one of the players lands on a pie space and answers the question correctly, everyone except me gets that color pie piece. It makes the game go a lot faster, and has the added benefit of making opponents cheer for each other, which is a nice contrast to a game like Monopoly where everyone is trying to screw each other. In answer-the-whole-card, I have to answer all six questions on a card before I can get a pie. So if I land on a pie space, and I answer that color correctly, it's treated like a non-pie space of the same color unless I can answer the other five questions on the card, and only then do I get a pie. All three give the game a lot more competitive balance.

Of course, one of the reasons Trivial Pursuit is so popular is that you don't need to play the game to play the game. You can just read the cards. We used to do that a lot in college. I remember one road trip where the person riding shotgun spent the entire trip reading cards aloud for the others to answer. The advantage here is that the reader can pick certain questions for certain people. If one of the players is a big baseball fan and the question is about baseball, the reader can ask that person to give everyone else a chance to answer. Or if you know one of the players just watched the Godfather for the first time, and there's a movies question about the Godfather, you can say that the question is only for that one person. It's a lot easier and more fun than the turn-based game.

One really stupid thing I do, if I'm playing with people who are getting frustrated, is to leave the back of the card (the side with the answers) uncovered before asking the question. Quick-witted opponents will realize that if they can just remember the answer while I'm asking, they'll get to roll again. But that's as much of a test of intelligence as knowing trivia, so it's fun to see people figure that out.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:55 AM on March 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: As kevinbelt mentions, there are a lot of editions of Trivia Pursuit. I found the older decades ones like the 1960s to be very difficult (seemingly only questions about Presidents or Beatles seemed reasonable). Where as the 1990s edition (packaged in an attractive metal tin) was much easier (both because I lived through it and I think they have dumbed down the questions).

We used to play with question decks from multiple edition...roll once to move and roll again to select which deck your question was from. You could obviously pick different decks for different people if you wanted to dial in the difficulty/fun aspect.
posted by mmascolino at 8:48 AM on March 27, 2023

Unless we were playing mixed age teams we just used different edition question packs for different participants. We had a junior edition and a classic one I seem to recall.

A bunch of the the early edition questions are simply superseded at this point. I was playing with a really old edition a while ago and let's just say it wasn't just art and entertainment questions that made no sense. Plenty of geopolitical changes in the last 40 years....
posted by koahiatamadl at 9:03 AM on March 27, 2023

Plenty of geopolitical changes in the last 40 years

Oh yes...there are many Genus I questions assume West and East Germany are currently a thing.
posted by mmascolino at 1:07 PM on March 27, 2023

This Brain Quest series of cards scratches the same itch as Trivial Pursuit but is much more age- and era-appropriate... and it can be challenging for the adults too. I recommend choosing 1 level up from the oldest child if they are close in age.
posted by nkknkk at 1:58 PM on March 27, 2023

Mind The Gap seems to have been made specifically for this. I recently bought it for my family. We haven't had a chance to play it yet, but I took a look at 1 card from each generation and they seem to have a good variety of questions. Feel free to memail me if you want examples.
posted by Eyelash at 3:11 PM on March 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

In my family, we play that you get a pie for any correct answer, no need to land on the right spot. We also are selective of what questions we ask, skipping the ones we know the answerer will have zero chance of knowing. This makes the game move along quickly.
posted by rhonzo at 3:31 PM on March 27, 2023

mind the gap is super fun. field tested with three generations of curiousers last Christmas.
posted by j_curiouser at 9:31 PM on March 27, 2023

Response by poster: Thanks for your answers everyone.
Mind the Gap is an interesting concept, but looks like it's all pop culture, which as I said, none of us know. Brain Quest looks better for us.
But I really appreciate everyone taking the time to consider this and especially ideas about varying the game a bit. This gives me a lot of ideas to try.
posted by FencingGal at 9:12 AM on March 28, 2023