Last month I told you about how we tried out the Hasbro Game Channel‘s Monopoly Plus; I’m back this month to talk about another of the first three games available to download (to your Xbox360, Xbox One, or Playstation): Trivial Pursuit.

(The third game is Risk. The kids wanted me to pick Risk as our next game to try, but I was all, “no, sorry. I’m not going to use my blog to support world domination, because I just don’t think that’s right. Also, I don’t want to play Risk. TRIVIA!)

Truth be told, this is the one I was really looking forward to. I enjoy a good game of Monopoly, but Trivial Pursuit is my true love. I’m pretty good at remembering unimportant things.

We try to get together with my brother, Sean, and my sister-in-law, Rebecca for game nights regularly. But what with life and stuff, it doesn’t happen as often as we’d like. We’ve been trying to figure out a good time for one since before Christmas, and there’s nothing like a blog deadline to make me say, “hey! we have to do this THIS WEEK!” Blog deadlines: bringing families together!

We had a group of kids and adults 9 and up, and everyone had a great time playing. You can have up to four players per game, so we wound up doing two games so everyone would have a turn. Like with Monopoly, you can either each use your own controller, or pass one controller around (we only have one Xbox controller, so we passed ours around).

Everyone picks an avatar first. I was a cowgirl:

And then you can do either a three or five round game. When I was reading up on some, well….trivia about Trivial Pursuit, I discovered that a common complaint about the updated versions of the board game is that they leave out arts and literature. So I was pleased to see Arts and Literature in its rightful place here. Because that’s my best category. It’s set up like a game show, and there are a few different formats for the questions. Some are just your standard multiple choice questions, but then also, as an example, there’s one format where they give you a question with a whole bunch of possible answers (one of ours was “Which of these are novels by Charles Dickens?”) and everyone takes turns picking out correct answers (and being eliminated if they pick one of the wrong ones) until either everyone’s out or all the right answers have been chosen. We really liked the different formats thing; it kept things interesting.

Ari got a question right:

Even the dogs got into the competitive spirit:

 

I know you’re wondering, so, yes, I totally won :). Rebecca won the game she was playing in, so, basically, the men and boys all lost.

Unlike Monopoly, we don’t have a board game version of Trivial Pursuit, so I’m very excited to have this new opportunity to show off how much I know about the novels of Charles Dickens on a regular basis.

After my Monopoly sugar cookies were such an enormous fail, I was determined to redeem myself with attractive and delicious game night snacks this time.

First up: the Jenga cheese tower! My Jenga cheese tower was a little less precision cut than real Jenga blocks. Also, held together with toothpicks:

But then there was the Trivial Pursuit fruit platter. I was quite fond of this one. The colors are not quite right because we couldn’t think of a brown fruit (hmm…..you know what you could do? a section with peanut butter or almond butter for dipping for the brown. Although I’m not sure anyone dips any of these fruits in peanut butter. But you could do carrots instead of orange wedges and celery instead of green grapes). And watermelon would have been more pink than strawberries, but it’s a little early for watermelon. Anyway, the fruit platter is a pie pan filled with six triangle shaped wedges of fruit, intended to look like a Trivial Pursuit game piece. Ours had red and green grapes, strawberries, pineapple, orange wedges, and blueberries:

There were supposed to be brownies decorated to look like dominoes, too, but I ran out of time. For the frosting part. I did make brownies, but they just looked like regular brownies, so they don’t get to be in the pictures.

So you’ve got your fruit and your cheese and, of course, some wine, and you’re all set for game night:

Linking with:

Link Party Palooza at I Heart Naptime

 

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.