Board Game Review: Trivial Pursuit 25th Anniversary Edition
December 2nd, 2008
We spent Thanksgiving in Kentucky with Gabe’s family. While visiting, we had a chance to play several games: Pictionary, TriBond, and Trivial Pursuit. I had heard about the 25th Anniversary edition recently, and I knew I had to get it. We decided to brave the madness at Target on Black Friday and purchase the game to play that evening. I’m glad that we did! Gabe, his mom, and I played it on Friday night. I don’t normally play Trivial Pursuit unless I’m a part of a team. I hate not knowing the answer to a question that *everyone* knows…everyone except me, that is! I figure that if I’m part of a team and my team doesn’t know the answer, then at least I’m not the only idiot!
I have many versions of Trivial Pursuit, but I enjoy the updates to the core game the most. I was intrigued by the changes that they made to the core game this time. This version has a few twists. The regular game remains the same, but now the questions have 3 different difficulty levels. The number that you roll determines the difficulty of the question that you have to answer. The cards are separated into 6 different stacks, and each stack has a single category. Each card has 6 questions from that category on a particular topic (1 and 2 are easy, 3 and 4 are medium, and 5 and 6 are hard). I really liked this new element. “Hooray, I landed on a pie wedge space! Oh, no, but I rolled a 5 to get there…the question is going to be impossible!” We didn’t always feel like the easiest questions were “easy,” but the opposite could be said of the “hard” questions. Generally, the questions did seem to be of appropriate difficulty. One drawback to all of the questions on one card dealing with the same topic is that you can no longer pass the card so the person answering can read it for themselves (in the case of a difficult pronunciation, for example). The other questions provide clues and often the answer itself since they deal with the same topic. We did not find this to be a huge deal, just a side note.
The other part of the twist is a “bonus track” around the edge of the board. Everyone has a pawn on the bonus track. As I mentioned previously, the classic game is the same: answer a question correctly, roll again, collect pie pieces when on the appropriate spaces. Whenever you answer any question correctly, you get to advance your colored pawn a number of spaces based on the difficulty of the question (1 for easy, 2 for medium, 3 for hard). The bonus track has several “zones,” and once per zone you have a “special ability.” The “challenge zone” allows you to challenge an opponent when they land on a pie wedge space. Whoever correctly answers the question first wins the pie wedge. Another zone allows you to move an opponent’s piece to another location on the board, possibly moving them further away from the pie wedges that they need. One zone allows you to answer an easy question instead of your designated difficulty. One space on the bonus track grants you a freebie pie wedge (none of us reached this space by the end of the game).
Overall, I liked the extra strategy, although I’m not sure that it changed the game all that much. It was an interesting twist, and it was neat to see how far everyone was advancing on the bonus track (versus the number of pie pieces everyone was collecting). The bonus track could almost be used as a secondary scoring mechanism. I really liked the varying difficulty. It took a little pressure off of me when I knew that I was about to get a hard question. If I knew the answer, I felt pretty good about it…if I didn’t, then I didn’t feel so bad. I did feel pretty stupid sometimes when I didn’t know the answer to an easy question! The designated difficulty is a nice change.
I look forward to playing the Trivial Pursuit 25th Anniversary Edition again, perhaps over the winter break.
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