Team Trivia (under a couple of different “brand names” and rulesets) was one of my favorite Atlanta past-times. Regardless of the specific type, all of the ones I played in Atlanta had a few similarities:

• Play was broken up into rounds of 3/4/5 questions.
• You’ve got one song to answer each question.
• You get the categories at the start of the round, and must wager points (1/3/5 or 2/4/6) on your guesses–but you can only use each point value once per round.
• At the end of the round, there’s usually a bonus question.
• Questions get progressively harder through the night.
• The game lasts around 2 hours.

Now, with this format, there are around 16-25 questions per night. The core of the activity, then, is just an excuse to hang out for a couple of hours with your friends, drink a few pitchers, and maybe win $20 in bar cash. From what I can tell, Team Trivia started in the south in bar-friendly towns like Jacksonville, Atlanta, and Charlotte…and it’s been slowly spreading outward from there. When I was here last summer, I searched in vain for anywhere in the bay area with a trivia night–to no avail. I was pretty excited that when I checked again this summer, there’s actually a company that runs trivia nights in the bay now. So tonight I went to go check it out and the Rose & Crown in downtown Pal Alto.

I’ve been to the pub before and like it quite a bit. I’d read online that it started at 8:30, so I got there at around 8:20–which I knew was late, but I was hopeful. Every table was taken, inside and out. I managed to squeeze some space at the end of a bar (with a chair) for me and my three teammates (who arrived later). The time online had been wrong–it didn’t actually start until 9:00–and it’s a little nuts that you’d have to be there 45 minutes to an hour early to get a table. This, though, is a problem of supply and demand.

In the Atlanta area on a Tuesday (M/W/T being the big trivia nights), there are probably 20-30 bars you could choose from to play trivia. This means that the people are pretty well dispersed, and you can kind of choose whether or not you want to go somewhere relatively empty or hit one of the crowded bars. On the peninsula…there are two choices. One in Palo Alto and one in Sunnyvale (which I’ll try next week). With no other alternatives, there were at least 30 teams here tonight (chaos!). Instead of a nice leisurely one question per song, this particular format of trivia had 7 rounds of 10 questions per round. After each question in a round, the guy waits about a minute before asking the next–with no particular sense of Easy -> Hard (they’re all random/hard).

This changes the complexion of the game completely. Instead of a relaxing evening out with your friends, you get literally no time to just sit and sip and socialize. Most of the time you have to frantically write down the questions so you can keep up. With 7 rounds of 10, that’s 70 questions (not to mention the “tie-breakers” every round) squeezed into the same time that a normal game would ask 20. There are no categories, either–and no sense of wagering. This takes out all of the sense of “gamemanship.” For example, if your three categories are Sports, Movies, and Literature–you may think to yourself, “Aww man, I’m a lit snob. I’ll save my big-point wager for the last question.” This can end up biting you in the ass if it’s something too obscure, but that sense of planning and strategy livens up the game. With this version, it’s a “Do you know it or not” game repeated 70 times with no variation.

In that sense, it’s not even really a game. It’s a roll of the dice. Given 70 questions, which team of four knows the most answers. In the Atlanta variants, it’s possible for two teams to answer 90% of the questions correctly and have totally different scores–all based on “strategy.” It seems to me, then, that this variant was cooked up by a Stanford grad who’d played one of the others. Only, being a Stanford CS anti-social type, they stripped out all of the fun social elements of the game and stripped it down to the one element they cared most about: Who knows the most useless trivia.

Don’t get me wrong–I know a ton of useless trivia. But I’ve never cared whether I won or lost at a trivia night. It’s really about sitting back, doing nothing for a few hours, and having a few beers with your friends. That seems to have gotten lost somewhere in the transcontinental crossing.