Let's Get Trivial

The hottest board game in America has all the answers

Question: When is the pursuit of trivia not trivial?

Answer: When a gang of three Canadians converts this curious hankering after the piffling and the piddling into the hottest game in town. The game in question is called Trivial Pursuit, and for more and more people across the U.S. and Canada the game offers not just the pursuit of happiness but happiness achieved.

Retail sales in the U.S. and Canada, where the game was invented and launched in 1982, may reach $70 million by the end of this year. Says Hudson Dobson, who distributes the game out of Dallas for U.S. manufacturer Selchow & Righter: "I have been in this business 30 years, and Trivial Pursuit is the biggest individual game I have ever had. It defies everything we've had before." F.A.O. Schwarz Manager Walter Reid predicts that will be "a long term fad, not like Rubik's Cube. which wore off after nine months."

T.P. doesn't beep, bleep, buzz or zap. It is played on a simple 20-in. by 20-in. multicolored board with a wheel-shaped pattern. Any number from two to 24 players ask each other questions drawn from 1,000 cards; a correct answer allows the player to move. Hardly Dragon's Lair but with a price tag as high as $40 in the U.S., it is indisputably a Boardwalk of board games.

As in all trivia contests, the questions make the game. There are 6,000 of them, witty, whimsical, wry and, sometimes, off the wall. Sample: Who played for the New York Rangers, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Knicks in a single season? (Organist Gladys Gooding.) Who was Bram Stoker's most infamous character? (Dracula.) What's the only country crossed by both the equator and Tropic of Capricorn? (Brazil.) What's a newly hatched swan called? (A cygnet.) Who portrayed Tonto on TV? (Jay Silverheels.)

The questions come from six categories: geography, history, art and literature, science and nature, entertainment, sports and leisure. In addition to the original game, there is now a Silver Screen edition of movie lore. Two versions now available in Canada, a Sports edition and one full of the esoterica beloved by the baby-boom generation, will soon be released in the U.S.

The game took shape on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Montreal in 1979 when two Canadian journalists, Chris Haney and Scott Abbott, challenged each other to a game of Scrabble. Then, Haney recalls, a light bulb went on over his head: "Why don't we invent a game?" Less than an hour later they had designed the basic structure. Devising the questions, however, took much obsessive poring over almanacs, encyclopedias and old newspapers. After nearly two years of research, the group, which included Haney's brother John, a retired hockey player, settled on 6,000 queries.

How to get backing was the hardest question of all. After scrounging a tidy bankroll for manufacture, the partners test-marketed 1,100 units in 1981. All were sold within a few weeks. Another loan from a bank manager who got hooked on the game enabled the entrepreneurs to produce 20,000 more. Word of mouth did the rest. The game acquired a cult following in Canada, and in 1982 Selchow & Righter, the venerable U.S. games company (Parcheesi), began manufacturing it in the U.S. British and Australian versions are imminent, and next year French, German, Dutch, and children's renditions will follow.

The game's appeal is far less obscure than most of the questions. It derives from the pleasure of playing against people armed not with joy sticks but with arsenals of minutiae. Notes John Nason, vice president of marketing at Selchow & Righter: "The pendulum's swinging back from video games. With a video game you sit alone in a corner. Playing a board game there is interaction--moaning, groaning, laughter."

No region of the country seems immune from that interaction. In North Miami, Ira and Ruth Gordon coax their friends to shuffle through their memories. Says Ruth Gordon: "Every couple we've ever invited over to play the game has bought it the next day." Nancy Spencer, a devotee of the game from Clifton, Va., claims, "It's better than charades, and that's hard to beat." She adds, "It's only frustrating when the kids know more than you do." In Hollywood, where game playing is sometimes the most exigent art form, Trivial Pursuit and its cousin Silver Screen are monster hits. During the filming of The Big Chill, the entire cast became addicted to the game, playing it night and day. Says Footloose Producer Craig Zadan, "There's not a person in the entertainment business who hasn't heard of the game, played it or been hooked by it."

Question: What Chinese parlor game swept America in the 1920s?

Answer: mah-jongg.

Question: Will Trivial Pursuit sweep America in the 1980s?

The correct answer has not yet been written by the public. But the early returns are encouraging. For the final answer, buy the 1990 version. By then the game will have become an American classic--or just a trivial footnote. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.