There has been a long history of trivia games including, including well known titles like Scene It? and Trivial Pursuit.  There are a number of obvious problems with this sort of game.  Firstly, it’s no fun playing when the “spod” in the corner always wins; this leads to the second problem which arises when one player decides the only way to win is to learn all the answers.  Some games designers use ingenious methods to get round this problem.  For example, the questions in Wits & Wagers have numerical answers that players are very unlikely to know, but can usually make an educated guess at.  For example, “In dollars, how much was each extra paid to run across the beach and scream in the movie Jaws?”  These questions don’t solve the problem in themselves, but in Wits & Wagers it’s not the answers that are really important, as players bet on each other’s suggestions with the pay out going to bets on the answer that most closely matches the truth, crucially, without exceeding it.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor domcrap

There is another way to stop the family’s “useless-fact sponge” winning every time though, and that is to add a sprinkle of wrong answers.  This was approach accidentally exploited by Paul Lamond Games, maker of Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway: The Board Game.  They mistakenly relocated Stonehenge in Somerset, misplaced the Moon by nearly fifteen thousand miles and killed off Albert Einstein six years early!  Paul Lamond Games have agreed to provide replacement cards for all that want them, however, a better solution might be to cut losses and replace the whole game with something better like Wits & Wagers, Codenames or one of the thousands of superb modern boardgames that are now available.

– Image from paul-lamond.com