Trivia Games

My game night group has been playing a couple trivia games lately (namely The Logo Board Game and Star Wars Trivial Pursuit - The Classic Trilogy) and I've learned a few things: I have amazing knowledge about kid's cereals and am severely lacking in my Star Wars knowledge.  This has taught me that trivia games are tremendous fun when you actually know the topic well and pretty torturous when you don't.  Part of the problem is the incredible delay between chances at playing the game (especially if your friends are experts) and the other part is that if you don't know the trivia, you have no way to win the game.  Obviously, the second makes perfect sense since that's the point of the game, but that doesn't make it any more fun to sit there playing knowing there's no way you can win the game.  It's like being that player in Settlers who got blocked in and can no longer build anywhere.

I've thought of a few ways to fix these issues while keeping in mind that the purpose of a trivia game first and foremost is to show your friends how smart you are, so it should be very difficult for someone with no trivial knowledge to win, but the game should still make them feel that they can win.  In a trivia game, this means that they need to be able to answer some questions even with minimal knowledge.  This train of thought led me to think an ideal trivia board game should be more like Jeopardy where players get to choose a difficulty level for each question (a strategic choice!).  The higher the difficulty, the higher the reward.  But the easier questions should be answerable by anyone with a very basic knowledge of the content (e.g. "What are the fuzzy inhabitants of the  forest moon of Endor?") so that players won't feel utterly defeated if they are sitting between people who know the names of all the relatives of the guy who held the boom mike in the fourth scene of the third movie.

That same issue also leads to a second important aspect to a good trivia game.  Turns should be short.  There should be some chance for players to answer multiple questions in a turn, but not to keep going until they get a wrong answer.  The Logo Board Game does a good job of balancing this.  Each card has four questions and no turn can last longer than four answers.  This way, even if you're sitting next to a trivia genius, your pathetically short turn won't feel so depressing when compared to the geniuses' only mildly lengthy turns.