Building a better trivia game with a Jeopardy master and Magic’s creator (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Building a better trivia game with a Jeopardy master and Magic’s creator (2019)

arstechnica.com

32 pointsTomte15 comments

I have also been thinking about the problem of trivia questions, and have come up with my own solution.

I found that multiple choice takes a lot of fun out of the competition, and makes it more guessing.

Instead, what I have done is hide the answer in a grid of letters and have the contestant find the answer. You will always be able to get the answer, but if you know it, you will find it faster.

screen recording of answering question: https://youtu.be/N9H9VkRjmsk

A full play through: https://youtu.be/j-myRUmq_QE

Interactive game for multiple contestants: https://triviarex.com

Interesting idea, might be useful in learning contexts with spaced repetition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvSfcm8F0fo

For those that haven't experienced the British version of Jeopardy, I invite you to give it your best shot with the above video. I can regularly answer ~60% of the board on Jeopardy but I'm lucky to get three questions right on University Challenge. I have no doubt that there is a better format to be had.

That said, Only Connect (also on BBC, watchable below) is a format that I think would meet great success if imported over to the US. Networks can trust audiences to buy into more complex formats now (compared to the utter simplicity of UC above) and Only Connect uses its complexity to great effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7HL3e63DFA

Hey, why does British clapping always sound so much more dainty and civilized than American clapping? Were we brought up to clap wrong? I've been to a few filmings of Jeopardy! and it's just a studio audience with a sign above the stage that flashes "clap", so people clap like they're at a baseball game. But holy hell, you all make it sound like you're watching Wimbledon and sipping tea with one hand and clapping with a pinky.

[edit] Watching this thing... wow. I thought I was good at Jeopardy! and I'm not bad to have around trivia nights. But this is absolutely insane. I've never felt dumber to be an American. These kids are stellar. Like, glorious shining examples of what I wish American kids were like. I love that they're all from different countries, as well. Staggering.

Only Connect is brilliant and the host is great.

In that vein, popular youtube creator and one-time only connect participant Tom Scott makes his own game shows, including one OC-inspired called Lateral. Lots of fun.

The best part of this game design is that whether you were good at trivia or found a trick to decode the card, after you've played you'll remember what the answers were. It's a teaching device for the trivia poor.

And if there are patterns to be discovered by people who don't know trivia, those are also patterns to be found or remembered if you do. It's trivia combined with iq-test style pattern recognition, with a strategy element (with the guess two or guess three thing.) I'm going to find out how it did and how many questions they got finished.

Seriously wondering, has Richard Garfield designed successful games after Magic: The Gathering? It’s probably hard to follow up that insane kind of success, especially if you hit it early.

Not -as- successful as Magic, but Vampire: The Eternal Struggle was popular in the 90s and still has a cult following (pun intended). In 2018 the license was officially transferred to a fan group that's resumed producing the game. Overall, it's spanned from '94 to '20 with only a handful of missing years, which is a pretty dang good run.

His Star Wars TCG also officially ran for three years and spawned 15 years of fan development.

And then there's Netrunner (the CCG, not the better-known later Fantasy Flight LCG, Android: Netrunner, that used its mechanics). It was well-reviewed but seems to have only survived for three years as well. I expect we'll be seeing some comeback of Netrunner since Android: Netrunner recently had its license pulled for as-yet-unknown reasons.

Android Netrunner's mechanics and game design are really unique, flavorful and full of great world-building. I so wish it could have exerted the same pull like MTG, but somehow it could not create the same long term engagement that MTG does. Maybe the core set was already so strong that the expansions could not really add that much to it.

King of Tokyo (and it’s sequel, King of New York) were rather popular gateway/filler games (i.e., getting people into board gaming or as a quick game before/between/after a big game) for a while. Nothing comparable to the success of Magic though.

I'm also fond of RoboRally, which was also successful enough to be printed multiple times, though not Magic-successful.

I've had fun playing Attack on Tokio

What do you expect!? MTG is on a par with chess, in many ways a stronger and deeper game.

It’s not so much expectation, but being curious. When a band releases a hit album, you want to know if there’s another one that’s similarly good.

Hm. Aspirin is wrong, or at least US-centric, because Bayer still has the trademark for it in Germany and much of the rest of the world. A packet of 8 is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 EUR at pharmacies here. The much more reasonably-priced generics are sold as, I’m absolutely not joking, “ASS” - Acetylsalicylsäure.

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