Trivial Pursuit is a board game where progress is determined by a player's ability to answer general knowledge or popular culture questions. Scott Abbott, a sports editor for the Canadian Press and Chris Haney, photo editor for the Montreal Gazette, developed the concept in December 1979; their game was released two years later.

In North America, the game's popularity peaked in 1984, the year over 20 million games were sold. The rights to the game were licensed to Parker Brothers (now part of Hasbro) in 1988. As of 2004, nearly 88 million games had been sold, in 26 countries and 17 languages.

Dozens of question sets have been released for the game. The question cards are organized into themes - for instance, in the standard "Genus" question set, questions in green are about "science and nature". Some question sets have been designed for younger players, others on a specific time period or as promotional tie-ins for pop culture (such as Star Trek, Saturday Night Live, and The Lord of the Rings movies).

The board and the rules

The game board consists of squares arranged in a six-spoked wheel shape. Each square is coloured 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) 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 also awarded a token representing the colour of the square, if they do not already possess that token. If the player answers incorrectly, play passes to the next player in sequence.

The game continues until a player has collected tokens of all six colours, then moves his or her marker back to the hub, at which point the other players select one colour and read the question from the corresponding category; the player must answer this final question 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 question of the chosen category correctly.

The game can also be a team game where several players are represented by a piece and their unanimous answer to the trivia question is deliberated upon.

External links

• Official website (http://www.trivialpursuit.com/)
• Rules (http://www.gameroom.com/gamebits/RULES/076_Trivial_Pursuit_Rules.html)
• Inventors and history (http://collections.ic.gc.ca/heirloom_series/volume4/216-219.htm)
• 2000 article (http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2000/012000/cover.html) written by a journalist who had written 50,000 questions for the game at that time
• 2002 article about the game (http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/4815878.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp) (requires registration)