Trivial Pursuit
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99 free Trivial Pursuit trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Trivial Pursuit is the board game that turned trivia into a living-room sport. Two Montreal journalists sketched it on the back of a cigarette carton in December 1979, researched the questions for a year, and by the mid-1980s it was selling tens of millions of copies and being bottled in plastic by the truckload in a small Wisconsin town. These 99 questions cover the whole story of the game: who the creators were and where they worked, the Scrabble argument that started it, the six wedge colours and what each one stands for, the exact-count rule at the hub, the Genus edition and its many spin-offs, and the two famous lawsuits, including the trivia author whose fake Columbo answer turned up in the box. There are questions on the arcade, home computer, console and mobile versions too, plus the parade of television hosts on both sides of the Atlantic. Easy questions ask about colours and categories; the expert tier goes to Dorset libraries, Soviet game shows and French magazine reviews. Every answer is cited and explained.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which country was Trivial Pursuit invented?
Canada
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.
Q 02Which sitcom's 'Bubble Boy' episode turns on a Trivial Pursuit card that misprints 'Moors' as 'Moops'?
Seinfeld
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.
Q 03Trivial Pursuit's inventors, Chris Haney and Scott Abbott, shared which profession when they dreamed up the game?
Journalism
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.
Q 04Chris Haney talked which would-be Trivial Pursuit investor out of buying shares, fearing the money would be lost?
His mother
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.
Q 05Trivial Pursuit's inventors dreamed up the game in 1979 while playing which other board game?
Scrabble
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.
Q 06How did buyers respond when Trivial Pursuit was shown at New York's Toy Fair in 1982?
With very few orders
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.
Q 07How were Trivial Pursuit's first sets sold?
At a loss
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.
Q 08The cast of which 1983 film was reported to play Trivial Pursuit between takes, boosting the game's cachet?
The Big Chill
The Big Chill: its story of old college friends reuniting was a perfect match for a game built on nostalgia.
Q 09Which magazine called Trivial Pursuit 'the biggest phenomenon in game history'?
Time
Time: the craze peaked in 1984, when some 20 million copies were sold in a single year after a slow, word-of-mouth start.
Q 10How did Trivial Pursuit's US marketers build buzz for the game in 1983?
Sending copies to stars it named
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.
Q 11Chris Haney and Scott Abbott spent part of their Trivial Pursuit fortune building two of what?
Golf courses
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.
Q 12Which toy giant paid $80 million in 2008 for the full rights to Trivial Pursuit?
Hasbro
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.
Q 13About how many Trivial Pursuit copies had sold worldwide by 2023?
100 million
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.
Q 21In classic Trivial Pursuit, orange wedges are earned in which category?
Sports & Leisure
Sports & Leisure: the orange category soon outgrew its wedge, and a whole All-Star Sports card set followed in 1983.
Q 22What are Trivial Pursuit's small plastic scoring wedges nicknamed in Britain?
Cheese
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.
Q 23What shape is the central hub space on the Trivial Pursuit board?
Hexagonal
Hexagonal: each side opens onto a spoke, so every player sets off from the middle with a choice of all the categories.
Q 14Where did Chris Haney, who feared flying, sail each winter once Trivial Pursuit had made him rich?
Spain
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.
Q 15Which generation, the game's keenest early buyers, got its own Trivial Pursuit edition in the 1980s?
Baby boomers
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.
Q 16Trivial Pursuit entered which hall of fame in 2025, alongside Battleship?
National Toy
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.
Q 17Which is one of classic Trivial Pursuit's six question categories?
History
History: its wedge is yellow, and while themed editions keep the six colours, they swap in categories of their own.
Q 18Which colour marks Geography questions in classic Trivial Pursuit?
Blue
Blue: later general-knowledge sets kept the colour but widened the category, renaming it People & Places.
Q 19Trivial Pursuit's pink wedges are won in which category?
Entertainment
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.
Q 20In Trivial Pursuit, Art & Literature wedges were originally brown before changing to which colour?
Purple
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.
Q 24What does every correct Trivial Pursuit answer earn?
Another roll
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.
Q 25To try Trivial Pursuit's winning question, how must a full playing piece reach the hub?
By exact count
By exact count: overshoot and the player must keep answering questions on the squares around it until a roll lands the piece there precisely.
Q 26Who picks the category for the final, game-winning question in Trivial Pursuit?
The opponents
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.
Q 27Which Latin word names the original, general-knowledge edition of Trivial Pursuit?
Genus
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.
Q 28A 2006 Sunday Telegraph analysis said British Trivial Pursuit leaned too heavily on what?
Celebrities
Celebrities: the paper found showbiz gossip turning up even among the science questions, and reported fans' charges that the game had been dumbed down.
Q 29What did Trivial Pursuit co-creator Chris Haney, who left school at 17, later call his one regret about it?
Not leaving sooner
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.
Q 30Why did a trivia author's suit against Trivial Pursuit fail?
Facts can't be owned
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.