I once watched a grown adult, a person with a mortgage and firm opinions about wine, correctly name an obscure moon of Saturn and then completely whiff on a question about a cartoon dog. That, in a single moment, is Trivial Pursuit: the game that turns the contents of your brain into a spectator sport.

The bones are pure roll and move. You trundle a token around a wheel shaped board, and wherever you land decides your category, history, geography, entertainment, science, art, sports. Answer right on a wedge space and you earn a little colored slice for your plastic pie. Collect all six, race to the center, nail one final question, and the evening is yours. Part trivia gauntlet, part lap around the board.

The questions are the whole show, and the glorious swing between triumph and humiliation they produce. Someone dredges up an impossible fact and basks in it, the next person blanks on a song the whole table is now humming, and everyone erupts either way. With editions for movies, decades, and kids, there is a flavor of pie for nearly any crowd.

Is it dated? A little. The roll and move can crawl, and a cold streak of bad categories stings like nothing else. But for a warm, sociable evening of discovering exactly which useless facts have taken up permanent residence in your head, I still pull it off the shelf, and I still lose to the one friend who only knows sports.

Are you a history and science buff or an entertainment and sports specialist? Tell me below, and tell me the one question that has haunted you for years. Mine involves a river. I have never recovered.

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