Game Reviews

Trivial Pursuit (iPhone)

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Trivial Pursuit (iPhone)

Remember the good old days when you’d huddle around a boardgame on the carpet with family or friends as a storm raged outside? Even if it always ended in a tantrum and room full of scattered game pieces, it’s still about bonding of a sort.

Video games come with fewer messes, but they have to work harder to forge the same social bonds. Trivial Pursuit manages to slice up its own piece of the fun pie, baking up a game that straddles solo and social play without any mess.

It handles the challenge by covering all bases. You want to play Trivial Pursuit as you remember it? Fine, the game offers you Classic mode, where the game board looks and plays just like its real-life counterpart. You still collect wedges for each of six categories - Geography, Entertainment, History, Sports & Leisure, Arts & Literature, and Science & Nature - by answering a slew of multiple choice questions.

Have friends to play with? Jolly good, you can either play by passing the handset among a maximum four players or, if you have equally tech-savvy friends and family, over local wi-fi. If you’re home alone, you can just play against a computer opponent.

Since playing the game all by your lonesome isn’t all that riveting, Pursuit mode offers something to fill the void. This level-based mode uses the same questions and categories as Classic, but tasks you with getting from one end of a linear path to the other within a certain number of questions and dice rolls, rather than collecting category markers.

Although instantly more engaging Classic alone, it starts off underwhelming because the simple paths seem like nothing more than transparent vehicles for questions. Once you’ve finished the first dozen, however, the game starts noting your strengths and weaknesses. Levels take on a far more fascinating, and occasionally deliciously evil, tilt.

You'll notice long, winding roads packed full of question categories you’re good at situated next to parallel short lines of categories at which you’re much less adept. Once you get to these more challenging levels, you realise what the purpose of the humdrum early levels was, and you'll forgive all instantly.

Combine these two modes and the decent multiplayer options and Trivial Pursuit shines. It doesn't quite sparkle, though. The game opts for a safe, sober presentation that mimics the solid tones and no-nonsense style of the board game with minimal flair.

Trivial Pursuit is among the best quiz games available on iPhone. While it doesn't have the glitz and glamour of others, it more than makes up for that with solid gameplay and an appealing array of modes. In short, it's the closest you can get to those fuzzy memories of stormy boardgame playing.

Trivial Pursuit (iPhone)

A highly competent quiz game that covers just about all the bases from gads of questions to multiplayer and even appealing solo play
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