Trivial Pursuit Football Edition

How do you end up with the job of providing questions for Trivial Pursuit? What kind of person do you have to be? We’re betting you know more than is healthy about obscure subjects as diverse as natural history to historical literature. At least you’re learning something new everyday, we suppose. But what about the poor sap who’s been tasked with providing a stack of questions for this, the Football Edition of Trivial Pursuit?

If you happen to know Gerd Muller’s nickname, or where the Maracana Stadium is, or even who won the 100th Cup Final, then you’re going to drool all over your shiny little phone when you get your hands on this. There’s a whole host of questions ranging from the very dawn of Association Football to the Premiership that we now know and love, including cup tournaments, international transfers, off the pitch fights and everything in between. It uses the same format as the original board game where questions don’t win prizes, they win you cheese-shaped wedges, and once you’ve answered a question correctly from each of the six different categories you’ve pretty much won. This may sound fairly simple, but just remember there are over a century’s worth of questions here, and whoever wrote them probably isn’t the kind of person you’d want to be stuck next to on the bus. A great deal of effort has gone into the research to be as concise as possible and spanning all areas of football from most generations.

We say most because, the questions do seem to be biased towards football from the sixties and seventies with a few token posers on the modern game thrown in for good measure. If you’re a teenager, adore football, know everything about your favourite team and the last decade of the premiership then you’re really going to be disappointed. The questions may well be multiple choice and give you a one in three chance of getting it right, but the novelty of guessing will quickly wear off and the lack of an appearance by Alan Shearer, Michael Owen or even Rebecca Loos will mean it’s not for you. If, on the other hand, you’re in your late twenties or older (especially older) then this is ideal for when you’re hanging out with up to five of your mates, all trying to out-do one another with your armchair knowledge.

Another sticking point is that when you get a question wrong you’re not told the right answer, something that’s becomes very annoying. This supposedly means the game will last longer as you‘ll have to try to get it right the next time it appears, unless you’ve already stomped on your phone in frustration by that time. The controls are very easy to get to grips with and come into their own when you’re playing with others, taking turns to “guess” the answers. The graphics of the board are quite hard to make out with tiny little playing pieces that can get a bit confusing, but otherwise they’re quite functional and don’t try to be too flashy and overcomplicated. As for sounds, well there aren’t any, so they’ve done a great job of capturing the ambience of a real life board game there. And that about sums it up; this really is only for hardcore football fans and is to be approached with caution by anyone under 30, who’d be better off buying the ordinary edition of Trivial Pursuit instead.