TP Just aint what it used to be! (Trivial Pursuit Genus IV)

Member Name: scotia1949

Product:	Trivial Pursuit Genus IV
Date:	26/06/01 (1160 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: demanding, educational

Disadvantages: new format, price is a rip-off

I have been a fan of Trivial Pursuit ever since it first came out and I still have my old dark blue box which is regularly used. I always thought TP was an expensive game, but boy did they know how to milk it. They had this subtle ploy, don't put the price up, just cut down the number of questions.

Would those of you who have not been with TP since it first came out be surprised to know that they have actually reduced the number of questions by SIXTY percent since Genus I?

The old blue box which I have has 6000 questions, now you only get 2400 and those novelty ones they bring out like Disney, Millennium etc only have 1800, rip off after rip off.

The way the game was first marketed had a lot of other advantages over the game as it stands now. First of all, they sold extra card sets. Some of these were extra questions to be used with the standard game, but some of them were like a game within a game. For example, they had an RPM card set which was all music questions, in six different categories, also a sports one and an entertainment one. I don't think they did the other main subjects.

The second card set I bought was basically a completely new game, based on the original TP board. It was called Baby Boomer and had questions aimed at the fortysomethings with politics, news, music etc from the 60s. I still think that is one of the best supplementary TP sets there was and I still occasionally play it.

I also have the family edition, even if I did wince at the price and the number of questions. One comment on another op about TP was how folk needed to be brainboxes to answer, well I find most of the children's questions are beyond my intelligent 12 year old who passed his 11+.

Which brings me to genus IV, the whole point of this op. Why change a winning formula, as another opinion stated. Do we really need a "quick game" format? In our house we used to play a quick game format by ignoring the r
ule about answering the last question in the middle, as that is often the most time-consuming part of one of our games.

The idea of having the quick jump to "wedge" squares ruins the new game for me, as does the fact that there are only six spaces instead of seven between the wedges. One of our complaints now about playing the old game is how out of date the questions are. We have now got round this by using the Genus IV questions on the Genus I board.

Trivial Pursuit is still a damned good game and we regularly play it with friends, sad anoraks that we are. We find it goes down very well at the end of a nice dinner washed down by several bottles of wine, even the wrong answers are fun then!

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