99 Fun Facts About Trivial Pursuit

In which country was Trivial Pursuit invented?

Canada: word of mouth sold 100,000 copies there by the end of 1982, before a US licence turned the game into a worldwide craze.

Which sitcom's 'Bubble Boy' episode turns on a Trivial Pursuit card that misprints 'Moors' as 'Moops'?

Seinfeld: George denies the Bubble Boy his winning answer because the card says 'Moops', and the row ends with the boy throttling him until the bubble bursts.

Trivial Pursuit's inventors, Chris Haney and Scott Abbott, shared which profession when they dreamed up the game?

Journalism: Haney was a picture editor and Abbott a sportswriter, and they turned up at a toy fair as a reporter-photographer team to quiz games experts for what Haney called $10,000 worth of information.

Chris Haney talked which would-be Trivial Pursuit investor out of buying shares, fearing the money would be lost?

His mother: Haney feared she would lose her money, so she missed out when the 32 friends and colleagues who put in $40,000 grew rich on the royalties.

Trivial Pursuit's inventors dreamed up the game in 1979 while playing which other board game?

Scrabble: by most accounts some tiles were missing, and Chris Haney, grumbling at what he had spent on sets over the years, wondered aloud whether the pair could invent a game as good.

How did buyers respond when Trivial Pursuit was shown at New York's Toy Fair in 1982?

With very few orders: buyers were cool on the idea, leaving its makers deep in debt until word of mouth and a US licensing deal turned it into a craze.

How were Trivial Pursuit's first sets sold?

At a loss: the first 1,100 sets cost about $75 apiece to make but went to shops for $15, so its makers lost about $60 on every one.

The cast of which 1983 film was reported to play Trivial Pursuit between takes, boosting the game's cachet?

The Big Chill: its story of old college friends reuniting was a perfect match for a game built on nostalgia.

Which magazine called Trivial Pursuit 'the biggest phenomenon in game history'?

Time: the craze peaked in 1984, when some 20 million copies were sold in a single year after a slow, word-of-mouth start.

How did Trivial Pursuit's US marketers build buzz for the game in 1983?

Sending copies to stars it named: consultant Linda Pezzano mailed games to actors who featured in the questions, and fan letters from the likes of Gregory Peck were used to promote it.

Chris Haney and Scott Abbott spent part of their Trivial Pursuit fortune building two of what?

Golf courses: the pair built the Devil's Pulpit and the Devil's Paintbrush, and Haney, once so short of money that he suffered panic attacks, ended up owning vineyards and racehorses too.

Which toy giant paid $80 million in 2008 for the full rights to Trivial Pursuit?

Hasbro: it had already made and sold the game under licence for years, so the $80 million bought the rights outright from the inventors and their original investors.

About how many Trivial Pursuit copies had sold worldwide by 2023?

100 million: the game reached 26 countries and 17 languages, earning well over $1 billion and making fortunes for backers who had risked as little as $1,000.

Where did Chris Haney, who feared flying, sail each winter once Trivial Pursuit had made him rich?

Spain: Haney wrote many of the first questions on an earlier stay there, by his own account working 16-hour days while some investors grumbled that they were paying for his holiday.

Which generation, the game's keenest early buyers, got its own Trivial Pursuit edition in the 1980s?

Baby boomers: the edition played to the nostalgia that sold the original, whose questions leaned on the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s its buyers had grown up with.

Trivial Pursuit entered which hall of fame in 2025, alongside Battleship?

National Toy Hall of Fame: it honours playthings that have stayed popular for years, and Trivial Pursuit beat nine other finalists, among them Catan and the Furby, to join it.

Which is one of classic Trivial Pursuit's six question categories?

History: its wedge is yellow, and while themed editions keep the six colours, they swap in categories of their own.

Which colour marks Geography questions in classic Trivial Pursuit?

Blue: later general-knowledge sets kept the colour but widened the category, renaming it People & Places.

Trivial Pursuit's pink wedges are won in which category?

Entertainment: each card carries one question per category, marked by a coloured dot, and a rival reads out the pink one when a player lands on that colour.

In Trivial Pursuit, Art & Literature wedges were originally brown before changing to which colour?

Purple: the new shade replaced brown in later sets, while the 1990s TV game shows went their own way and lit that wedge in red.

In classic Trivial Pursuit, orange wedges are earned in which category?

Sports & Leisure: the orange category soon outgrew its wedge, and a whole All-Star Sports card set followed in 1983.

What are Trivial Pursuit's small plastic scoring wedges nicknamed in Britain?

Cheese: the wedges look like portions cut from a round cheese, and the nickname travels, since French players call them camemberts and Spanish players quesitos.

What shape is the central hub space on the Trivial Pursuit board?

Hexagonal: each side opens onto a spoke, so every player sets off from the middle with a choice of all the categories.

What does every correct Trivial Pursuit answer earn?

Another roll of the die: a turn lasts until the first miss, so a flawless player could fill the whole piece before anyone else has had a go.

To try Trivial Pursuit's winning question, how must a full playing piece reach the hub?

By exact count: overshoot and the player must keep answering questions on the squares around it until a roll lands the piece there precisely.

Who picks the category for the final, game-winning question in Trivial Pursuit?

The opponents: they settle it by agreement or a vote before the card is drawn, so they are choosing a subject, never a particular question.

Which Latin word names the original, general-knowledge edition of Trivial Pursuit?

Genus: the name stayed with the general-knowledge line as Genus II and beyond, yet many devotees ignored every new edition and kept going back to that first box.

A 2006 Sunday Telegraph analysis said British Trivial Pursuit leaned too heavily on what?

Celebrities: the paper found showbiz gossip turning up even among the science questions, and reported fans' charges that the game had been dumbed down.

What did Trivial Pursuit co-creator Chris Haney, who left school at 17, later call his one regret about it?

Not leaving sooner: Haney joked that dropping out was his biggest mistake only because he should have done it years earlier, yet colleagues remembered a brilliant, self-taught and widely read mind.

Why did a trivia author's suit against Trivial Pursuit fail?

Facts can't be owned: the makers freely admitted drawing on Fred L. Worth's trivia books, but US courts held that copyright does not cover facts, so his $300 million claim failed.

Trivial Pursuit repeated a planted fake giving which TV detective the first name 'Philip'?

Columbo: author Fred L. Worth had invented 'Philip' to catch copycats and sued when it surfaced on a game card, though the badge shown on screen reads Frank.

Which court ended a trivia author's suit against Trivial Pursuit by refusing his 1988 appeal?

US Supreme Court: Fred L. Worth had already lost twice in lower courts, so its refusal in March 1988 closed a fight that had begun with a $300 million claim.

What must a Trivial Pursuit player do after missing the final, game-winning question?

Leave the hub and return: nothing already won is lost, but the piece must move off on the very next turn and work its way back, which gives rivals a chance to catch up.

The 1994 claimant said he pitched the idea while doing what in 1979?

He said he described the game in detail, right down to the shape of the markers.

Which veteran game-show host fronted the Trivial Pursuit TV show on The Family Channel in 1993?

Wink Martindale: he was no hired face but one of the show's producers, and it became the first of four game shows he made with the channel.

What could viewers at home do during breaks in the 1993 Trivial Pursuit TV game show?

Phone in and play for prizes: ten 'Playbreaks' an afternoon let callers play along at home for rewards that ran from telephones to holidays and cruises.

Which saga's 'Classic Trilogy' got a Trivial Pursuit collector's edition in 1997?

Star Wars: the set kept the six wedge colours but remapped them to subjects such as Weapons & Vehicles and Droids, Creatures & Aliens.

Who hosted the Trivial Pursuit game show that premiered on The CW in October 2024?

LeVar Burton: a fan petition with more than 250,000 names won him a week guest-hosting Jeopardy! in 2021 but not the job, and the Trivial Pursuit deal was announced that November.

What happens when a Trivial Pursuit player lands on the hub before collecting every wedge?

They choose their own category: the middle is a wild card, so a shortcut across the board along a spoke can also buy a question on a player's strongest subject.

Where on the board must a Trivial Pursuit player answer correctly to win a scoring wedge?

On a category headquarters: one sits at the end of each spoke, and each wedge won there slots into the player's own piece, which doubles as the scoreboard.

Under Trivial Pursuit's classic rules, who decides how long anyone may take to answer?

The players themselves: the rules set no time limit and no standard for how exact an answer must be, leaving each group to agree, say, whether a surname alone will do.

Chris Haney said Trivial Pursuit's runaway success made its inventors feel like what?

Rock stars: 'People still shake in their boots when they meet us,' Haney said in 1993, years after the pair had been hawking shares to workmates at $1,000 a time.

How do Trivial Pursuit's rules decide which player takes the first turn?

The highest die roll starts: ties are rolled off, and every piece begins in the middle, free to head down any of the six spokes.

Which move do Trivial Pursuit's rules forbid a player from making within a single roll?

Doubling back on its path: a piece may set off in any direction and turn at a junction, but it must use the whole roll without retracing a step.

Roughly how many questions came in the original Trivial Pursuit box?

6,000: they were printed six to a card on 1,000 cards, whittled down by the inventors from some 10,000 drafts over two years of research.

An original Trivial Pursuit trick question asked for the world's largest diamond, expecting which answer?

A baseball diamond: Chris Haney loved such quirky questions, which gave the game just enough happy-hour impishness, as one writer put it, to stop it becoming too earnest.

The 1993 Trivial Pursuit TV show was itself adapted into what?

A board game edition: the Game Show Edition brought the TV format home the same year, completing a loop from board to screen and back again.

Trivial Pursuit first went on sale in France under a French title meaning what?

Brainstorming: French shops sold it as Remue-méninges, literally a stirring of the brains, until the English name took over in 1985.

Which film trilogy got its own Trivial Pursuit edition in 2003, the year its final part reached cinemas?

The Lord of the Rings: one critic credited movie tie-ins like it with keeping the game selling briskly, while mourning that specialists were replacing the proud generalist.

Trivial Pursuit fell for a hoax by crediting the fictional Otto Titzling with inventing which garment?

The bra was credited to Otto Titzling on a Trivial Pursuit card, but he was invented for Bust-Up, a 1971 spoof by humorist Wallace Reyburn. Bette Midler later sang about him too.

In which animated sitcom does winning a rigged game of Trivial Pursuit convince the dad he is a genius?

Family Guy built its 2005 episode 'Petarded' on the game: Lois feeds Peter questions from a preschool edition so that he wins. His bragging leads to a test that proves the opposite.

An original Trivial Pursuit card asks who replaced Pete Best in 1962; which drummer is the answer?

Ringo Starr took over on 16 August 1962, after the other three members asked their manager to fire Best. The first cards leaned heavily on 1950s and 1960s nostalgia of this kind.

An older British Trivial Pursuit card asks whose death led President Pompidou to say 'France is widowed'; who had died?

Charles de Gaulle died suddenly at home on 9 November 1970. Georges Pompidou, once his prime minister, told the nation on television: 'General de Gaulle is dead. France is a widow.'

A Trivial Pursuit card wrongly said Godzilla wins the Japanese cut of a 1962 film; which rival wins both cuts?

King Kong is the winner in the Japanese and American cuts alike. A 1960s monster magazine invented the story of two endings, and the card repeated it as fact.

A British Trivial Pursuit card asks which singer heckled Madonna for miming at a 2004 awards show; who was it?

Elton John used the Q Awards to object to Madonna's Best Live Act nomination, saying anyone who lip-syncs to paying crowds 'should be shot'. He later said he regretted the outburst.

Which illusionist's 44 foodless days in a box beside the Thames became a British Trivial Pursuit question?

David Blaine spent 44 days in a clear box hung beside the Thames in 2003, drinking only water, and lost a quarter of his body weight. Doctors later published a paper on his recovery.

At the height of the craze in 1984, about how many Trivial Pursuit games were sold in that single year?

20 million games were sold in 1984, up from about 1.3 million the year before. The partners liked to say that one was being bought every second, 24 hours a day.

Trivial Pursuit co-inventor Scott Abbott became owner of the Brampton Battalion, a junior team in which sport?

Ice hockey became his second career: the Battalion took the ice in 1998 and later moved to North Bay, and a local sports hall of fame inducted him in 2005 for building the team.

An original Trivial Pursuit card asks for the international radio code word for the letter O; what is it?

Oscar has stood for O since the aviation spelling alphabet was settled in the 1950s. It replaced the wartime Able Baker list, in which the same letter was Oboe.

Original Trivial Pursuit cards ask for the most common Russian surname; which answer is printed on the back?

Ivanov, which simply means 'Ivan's', was the card's answer. The name ranks among the most common in both Russia and Bulgaria.

Which Israeli general's eye patch is the subject of an original Trivial Pursuit card asking which eye it covered?

Moshe Dayan lost his left eye in 1941, when a sniper's bullet struck the binoculars he was using on a rooftop in Lebanon. Surgery in Paris six years later failed to repair the damage.

An older British Trivial Pursuit card asks how many times the speed of sound counts as hypersonic; what is the answer?

Five times the speed of sound, or Mach 5, is the usual threshold. Around that point the air flowing past a craft grows hot enough for its molecules to start breaking apart.

In 1984 the company Bally Sente turned Trivial Pursuit into which kind of coin-operated machine?

An arcade game came out in several editions that year, including one for young players. Sente had been founded by former Atari staff and was newly owned by Bally.

Christopher Knight, host of the 2008 game show Trivial Pursuit: America Plays, was a child star of which sitcom?

The Brady Bunch made Knight famous as middle son Peter. Four of his former screen siblings joined him on the quiz for a themed 'Brady Week' in November 2008.

Which 30 Rock character claims to have played Arts and Literature in a film version of Trivial Pursuit?

Jenna Maroney, the show's vain actress, drops the credit in passing. The joke returns in another episode, where she names the assistant she had on 'Trivial Pursuit: The Movie'.

Trivial Pursuit's inventors met when Chris Haney moved cities to prepare for which sporting event of 1976?

The Summer Olympics drew Chris Haney to town months early to prepare for the Games, and Scott Abbott was already in the same office. Abbott said they were fast friends by noon on day one.

Which age recommendation was printed on the original Trivial Pursuit box when the game reached American shops?

'Age: Adult' was all the box said, and the lid showed none of the smiling children found on rival games. Being warned off only made the game more tempting to its buyers' children.

Which band's collector's edition of Trivial Pursuit had all 2,592 questions written by historian Bruce Spizer?

The Beatles are Spizer's specialism: a New Orleans tax lawyer, he started collecting again after cockroaches ruined the albums he had kept since childhood, then wrote a shelf of books on the band.

Horn Abbot, the company behind Trivial Pursuit, paired Scott Abbott's surname with which detail about Chris Haney?

His nickname was 'the Horn'. The partners paired it with a clipped spelling of Abbott when they set up Horn Abbot Ltd in January 1980, almost two years before the first games went on sale.

Which relative of Chris Haney joined him, Scott Abbott and Ed Werner as a founding partner in Trivial Pursuit?

His brother John became one of the four partners. During the lean months he sat in bars reading the backs of gin and vodka bottles, hunting for facts to make into questions.

Ed Werner, the fourth founding partner in Trivial Pursuit, earned his living as what before the game took off?

A lawyer and a friend of John Haney, Werner joined as the partners began selling shares to friends and relatives, which raised about $40,000 from 32 small investors.

At a 1984 Trivial Pursuit shareholders' meeting, envelopes billed as a prize draw turned out to hold what?

Dividend cheques were inside, a prank by the four partners: each block of shares paid $50,000. One actor in the front row greeted his with a shout too rude to print.

Which American game maker took over the Trivial Pursuit licence in 1988, two decades before the rights were sold?

Parker Brothers, the publisher of Monopoly, stepped in after the game's first American distributor was bought by a toy company that soon went bust.

Which American firm, the maker of Parcheesi, first licensed Trivial Pursuit for the United States in 1982?

Selchow & Righter, a New York firm dating from 1867, put a major publicity campaign behind the game, and sales that had crawled at first exploded within two years.

Which toy company bought Trivial Pursuit's American publisher in 1986, then filed for bankruptcy two years later?

Coleco, rich from Cabbage Patch Kids, paid $75 million for a firm whose warehouses were filling with unsold games. The purchase helped push it into Chapter 11 in 1988.

Which 18th-century English poet is quoted on the box of the original Trivial Pursuit set?

Alexander Pope's words helped dress the game as a stylish accessory rather than a toy, and the price matched: about $40, nearly twice what most board games cost.

Trivial Pursuit's circular board, with spokes running in to a central hub, was based on which object?

A ship's wheel gave the board its outline. The round playing pieces were the other neat idea, since each one doubles as its owner's scorecard.

In the mid-1990s, how many writers devised the questions for Britain's Trivial Pursuit board games?

One man did it all: Brian Highley, a former schoolteacher from Devon and Spitting Image scriptwriter, who sought out the game's inventors on their holiday in Devon and offered his services.

Which British software house, later part of Eidos, had an early hit with a 1986 Trivial Pursuit computer game?

Domark sold roughly two million copies of the conversion, after a rival publisher had doubted the idea would work. The money moved the young firm into proper offices.

Which publisher released the console quiz Trivial Pursuit Live! in 2014 and followed it with a sequel in 2022?

Ubisoft launched it on PlayStation and Xbox consoles and brought it to the Nintendo Switch in 2018. The 2022 sequel was built by the studio Snap Finger Click.

Which popular podcast got its own edition of Trivial Pursuit in 2021, with categories picked by its two hosts?

Stuff You Should Know supplied 600 questions drawn from its episodes. Stuck players can reach for lifelines, one of them named 'Stuff You Should Skip'.

Which 'Weird Al' Yankovic video flashes a made-up Trivial Pursuit card asking where the largest ball of twine is?

White & Nerdy, his 2006 single, shows the card on screen. Another of its questions asks how many Wicket men play on a 43-Man Squamish team, a sport invented by Mad magazine.

Which 1985 Chevy Chase comedy ends with arms negotiators playing a nuclear blend of Risk and Trivial Pursuit?

Spies Like Us closes with its bumbling agents, led by Chase and Dan Aykroyd, turned disarmament negotiators and settling matters with their new friends over the board.

Breaking All the Rules, a 1988 TV movie about Trivial Pursuit, set the game's invention in what kind of place?

A strip club was where the film had the idea born, on the inventors' lunch breaks, and it drew them as beer-drinking slackers. Both men said the game was really devised at home.

Chris Haney's sister Mary wrote questions for the first Trivial Pursuit; what was she paid for each one accepted?

25 cents a question was the 'princely sum' she remembered. The partners wrote thousands more questions than they needed and kept only the best.

Trivia author Fred Worth sued Trivial Pursuit's distributors in 1984 for copying his books; how much did he demand?

$300 million was his claim, on the grounds that more than a quarter of the questions came from his trivia encyclopedias. He lost at every stage.

A 1982 review in Games magazine praised Trivial Pursuit's questions but warned players about which drawback?

Long waits between turns were reviewer Mike Shenk's one complaint. He rated the questions 'excellent in quantity, scope, and level of difficulty'.

Offered company shares for his early Trivial Pursuit artwork, cartoonist Terry Mosher chose which payment instead?

A flat cash fee of $1,000 was his pick when Chris Haney offered that or shares. The 32 small investors who did take shares all grew rich on the royalties.

A British Trivial Pursuit card asks for Prince Charles's pet name for Camilla; which name is the answer?

Gladys was the name on the card, which came in the edition on sale at Christmas 2006, the year after the couple married.

In Trivial Pursuit X, a risqué 2017 edition, what does a player receive for every wrong answer?

A forehead stamp, an inked 'X', marks each miss, and the first player to collect five of them loses.

Under Trivial Pursuit's rules, what are players still waiting for a first turn allowed if someone wins straight away?

A chance to tie is written into the rules, because a player on a perfect streak could collect everything and win before anyone else has moved.

Under Trivial Pursuit's rules, who plays next when the player holding the die answers a question wrongly?

Whoever sits to the left goes next, so play moves clockwise. Someone else always reads the question aloud, taking the card from the front of one of the two boxes.

On a 2008 Trivial Pursuit game show, who posed the questions that studio contestants had to answer?

Viewers, on video, made up 'America's Team': each wrong studio answer paid money into their bank, and if they finished ahead it was split among those whose questions aired.

Chris Haney and Scott Abbott both spent Trivial Pursuit money on owning which kind of sporting animal?

Racehorses carried both men's colours. Abbott set up his own stable and named one star runner, Charlie Barley, after his young son.

A 1998 Dutch study, subtitled 'how to win a game of Trivial Pursuit', had volunteers first think about which group?

Professors were the cue: volunteers who first pictured a typical one reportedly answered more general-knowledge questions, and those who pictured soccer hooligans fewer. Later labs failed to repeat the result.

Total sales of Trivial Pursuit since its 1981 launch are estimated to have passed which sum?

$1 billion is the usual estimate, built on sales in 26 countries and 17 languages.

In a coma fantasy on The Drew Carey Show, Drew plays Trivial Pursuit with Abraham Lincoln and which playwright?

William Shakespeare joins the game in a dream world that also offers a pizza tree and a beer fountain. The episode swapped the usual theme tune for The Smiths' 'Girlfriend in a Coma'.

In the title mode of the 2004 console game Trivial Pursuit: Unhinged, what can players do while rivals answer?

Bet on the outcome is the twist, and special squares add more: one teleports a piece anywhere on the board, while another spins the whole board to shift everyone at once.

Which comedian hosted the BBC's 1990 game show based on Trivial Pursuit, three years before a cable revival?

Rory McGrath fronted 16 episodes on BBC1 in the autumn of 1990. Tony Slattery took over when the format returned on another channel in 1993.