Trivial Pursuit

Trivial Pursuit is a board game containing elements of a track game[?], where progress is determined by a person's ability to answer general knowledge questions. Canadians Chris Haney and Scott Abbott, two employees of the Montreal Gazette[?] newspaper, developed the concept in December 1979; the game was released two years later.

The game board consists of squares arranged in a wheel shape, with six "spokes". The squares are preassigned colours in a systematic pattern, with one special square of each colour located at the connection of the "wheel" with each spoke respectively. The players start in the "hub" of the wheel. The players in turn roll the die and move their tokens in the direction of their choice the number of squares indicated by the die. Once the die lands, another player draws a card from a large collection (supplied with the game or sold separately for the purpose) and asks the rolling player a trivia question on the card corresponding to the colour. If the player answers correctly, he or she can roll again. If the square is one of the special squares located as the intersection, the player is additionally awarded a token representing the colour of the square, if they do not already possess such a token. If the player answers incorrectly, play passes to the next player in sequence. The game continues until a player has collected all six token colours, and moves his or her marker back to the "hub" location, at which point the other players can examine the question card and choose what they believe to be the most difficult-to-answer question, which the player must answer correctly to win the game. If the player does not do so, the game continues until that player, or another player with all six colour tokens, moves to the hub square and answers a chosen question correctly.

A huge variety of question sets have been released for the game. The question cards are designed so that each colour represents a question theme - for instance, in the standard "Genus" question set, questions in green are about "nature". Some question sets have been designed for younger players, others on a specific time period or even a fictional universe (for instance, Star Trek).

The game has been an enormous commercial success around the world when released and is still one of the world's most popular copyrighted board games.

External Link Further reading http://collections.ic.gc.ca/heirloom_series/volume4/216-219.htm