The peculiar power that trivia has over the British psyche is borne out by the huge number of Pub Quizzes that run every week in the UK. Outside that, look in any dark corner and you'll find a quiz machine next to the fruit machines and “games of chance and skill”. Trivia is big business.
And while there are countless quiz-masters out there setting questions and organising pub leagues, there are some brand names everyone recognises. Trivial Pursuit has to be one of the biggest, and Electronic Arts have brought their mobile version to the Ovi Store so you can challenge your friends and yourself to some games of “who knows the most useless things.”
Let's jump straight to the middle of the application – the questions and the interface to answer those questions. Using the touchscreen makes this feel more like a pub machine – it's an improvement over using a cursor pad to select an answer. The question is displayed at the top, and you can choose from three possible answers. It's inevitable that until voice recognition can cope with the imprecise answers in a trivia game that you'll be left with a multiple choice interface. That's fine, I can understand that, but with only three possible answers, and one that's invariably obviously wrong, many questions feel more like a 50/50 than Trivial Pursuits when asked around the dinner table at home.
With the questions, there are two fundamental problems in this version. The first is language and the second is maths. Actually, the second problem can be summed up in the style of the first. Which is if a question asks about math; or color; or any other american spelling of a popular word. The questions are all in American-English and the subject matter is certainly from the North American continent; I've had to read up on my baseball rules and ice hockey teams if I keep getting all these sports questions.
So, the second problem is less of a problem at the moment, but I'm expecting it to be as time goes on. There are only 1000 questions in the application. As these are split up over the regular six Trivial Pursuit categories, that's only 175 questions or so for each category. If you focus on one category while playing (I tend to go for Entertainment and Science & Nature) then you're going to run out of questions after about two weeks of normal usage.
That's all well and good from a business model point of view (making sure users buy a new game every fortnight) but from the user's point of view, that seems to be quite a short amount of time. Depending on how good your recall is, you might end up with Memory Pursuits rather than Trivial Pursuits in short order.
Questions aside, how is the game play? It's really good for a mobile version – and the key is that there are two ways to play. The first is the classic circular board, where you have to collect wedges of right answers before returning to the centre of the board for a victory question. This is exactly the same as in the boxed version, and you can set up a game with a number of variably strengthened computer AI players.
Sensibly, there are options so that wedges can be earned on any question answered and a lower number of wedges to “win” the game if you want to shorten the game, a vital concession for mobile.
You can also have a multi-player game in “pass and play” mode where everyone takes turns by passing the phone around. It'll do at a push, but I'd still prefer the board game if in pleasant company. This mode lets you access the aforementioned classic game, but also the more exciting sounding “pursuit”, which is also available as a single player mode.
I suspect that the solo pursuit mode will be the version of this game that will get the most time spent on it. Rather than bounce around the board, you have a maze to navigate – starting out quite simply but branching into ever more complicated layouts as you go on. Answer the questions correctly to move forward – and answer quickly to move forward a lot! Once the question is displayed, a dice counts down from 6 to 1 and a right answer moves forward the spots that are left on the dice. Given that the next category is dependent on where you land, tactics might force a snap answer or wait a while to get the move you want.
No matter how you answer, it's all about how quick you can get to the finish line – there's a limited number of questions available if you want to get a Gold Medal awarded, plus the mazes are long enough that you'll need nine or ten questions right in a fast time at later levels to get there. Silver and Bronze are also available for those happy with a lesser achievement.
The big secret of Trivial Pursuit? It's a perfect mobile implementation of a desktop game, the tweaks for a faster game playing mechanic don't kill the essence of what makes Trivial Pursuit the game it is, and they've retained the classic board game everyone loves. Apart from the volume of questions, it's hard to find any major flaws in this implementation. This is definitely getting recommended.
-- Ewan Spence, July 2010.