Much like the recently announced Family Game Night Fun Pack, we played the original, but seemingly little known Trivial Pursuit game to death - many a Sunday afternoon was spent with four of us huddled around the Xbox 360, playing the new 'Facts & Friends' mode, which saw four players compete for the same six wedges, earning portions of each wedge with every correctly answered question. When you weren't answering questions, you were instead being asked whether the player who was answering the question would get it right - and if your hunch was right, you'd earn a portion of the wedge. So when we first got wind of the newly announced Trivial Pursuit: Bet You Know It, we thought it sounded like it could be a sequel that simply took the Facts & Friends mode a bit further - but after a little bit of poking, we found it was an actual, official board game edition of Trivial Pursuit, that's being turned into a Wii friendly instalment.
In Facts & Friends, the number of wedges you accumulated got converted to lives for the final question(s) - each wrong answer cost you a life until there was only one person left.
Trivial Pursuit: Bet You Know It is played in the same way as the previous games - you have a counter and a dice, and move round the board, answering questions on general knowledge as you go, whilst trying to collect as many wedges as you can. The difference here is that for Bet You Know It, each player has a set of 'chips', which they can use to bet on whether they think the person answering the question will get it right, in a very similar way to the Facts & Friends mode, except now you'll earn chips for each correct bet. These chips can then be used to buy wedges, and can even buy you the chance to pick which question you get asked at the end, if you hoard enough.
While it sounds a tad more complex than the other game, it also sounds like an interesting variation on the standard Trivial Pursuit game, and we're sure EA will make it easy enough to understand - I mean, Facts & Friends sounds a bit confusing on paper, but it's quickly become our favourite mode in the original. And should you fancy some good old fashioned Trivial Pursuit, without any of the new bells and whistles, Trivial Pursuit: Bet You Know It also includes a standard, Trivial Pursuit mode, free from any betting. With a whopping 7,000 questions packed in (how they fit that many cards on a disc, I'll never know), all based on "today's current events, pop culture and more", there'll hopefully be little repetition, too. Unfortunately, at the moment, it seems that Trivial Pursuit: Bet You Know It will only be available on the Wii - no Xbox 360 version has been announced so far.
With not one, not two, but three awesome game collections on the way from EA - Family Game Night Fun Pack, the Monopoly Collection and Trivial Pursuit: Bet You Know It, we're starting to wonder if we'll ever have to buy a board game again. Each of these collections is due out in time for Christmas, making them perfect for the traditional post-Christmas dinner family board game.
