do you know any good Trivial Pursuit card packs?

October 28, 2023 6:48 PM

I am a highly educated middle-aged person but I can't answer hardly any of the classic deck or even the 80s deck.

I am a nerd and I like trivia and I want to play Trivial Pursuit but I've never found a deck that I could do well at.

The Harry Potter one was way too easy. the 80s and the Classic (from the old blue box) are way too hard.

Do you know any that are actually fun?

posted by fingersandtoes to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (8 answers total)

There is a set of mini decks with decades going from the 1980s to the 2010s. Whether that would be helpful for you depends on why the 80s and the classic games were too hard.
posted by FencingGal at 9:04 PM on October 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Honestly, the ones I DONT do well on are the ones I like.
If you like trivia, it's fun to get better at it and the ones you don't do well on seem like the way to do it.
I am not particularly educated, but do pretty well on the original decks, except the things that have changed since the printing. But it's sort of fun to try to play time-traveling Trivial pursuit-- what WAS the tallest building in the 1980s?
posted by ReluctantViking at 8:24 AM on October 29, 2023

Best answer: I'm 47 and grew up being the little kid side kick while the extended family played the original Genus I edition. Wikipedia has an intense list of Trivia Pursuit editions. I remember the 90s edition being fun and relatively straightforward...unlike the 1960s edition which felt impossible unless the answer was a president or a Beatle.
posted by mmascolino at 11:51 AM on October 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

This brings up the question of what the purpose of a trivia game is - the game is looking for you to have memorized a very specific subset of information, and then to be able to understand the frame of the question in order to respond with a short answer that matches the preset response. So, when picking a question set, are you trying to find a knowledge set that better fits your background? Or just to have fun trying to answer the questions in a game setting?

I don't have any good suggestions for the former. For the latter, as a kid I had a lot of fun occasionally reading the cards from our classic set and then later playing and seeing what I could remember. (I also read the dictionary for fun, so YMMV.)
posted by past unusual at 1:09 PM on October 29, 2023

I am 44 and I’m a huge fan of both the genus and 80s decks *because* of how little I get right. Also some of it is in fact now flatly wrong, which is also fun. I don’t find the classics deck to be that fun, feel you there.

Anecdotally the mini decks are something I always look for at thrift stores, they are around.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:10 PM on October 29, 2023

Best answer: The Book Lover's Edition is tough in an enjoyable way, (and one of the few question sets my friends don't make me go around the board twice with when we play to give everyone a fair chance at winning). We also use the 2000s Edition gameboard, which has no "Roll Again" spaces, which helps keep the dice moving around from player to player. more frequently.
posted by KingEdRa at 8:28 PM on October 29, 2023

Do you like movies? The Silver Screen edition is fun though probably quite dated now; I don’t know if there are updates for it. But when we played it about twelve or so years ago, a friend who never even watches much in the way of films beat us all. Lots of fun questions about old Hollywood and international cinema besides just naming movies.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 5:19 AM on October 30, 2023

We have the family edition. It has one set of questions for kids, and one for adults. My partner answers the kid questions and it's the only thing that makes Trivial Pursuit enjoyable to them.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 12:13 PM on October 30, 2023