Trivial Pursuit - A Board Game Born From Frustration?

Everybody is familiar with the board game Trivial Pursuit, what they may not be familiar with is the back ground story to it being created.

It never ceases to amaze me as to the origins of some of the games that we play today in the 21st century. Some of them are shrouded in history with little known facts of any relevance to substantiate their true roots, however, have a compelling story to be told.

Taking the game of Keno, the roots are anything but hidden, this game dates back over three thousand years to ancient China. One of the governing rulers at the time wanted to raise taxes, but feared that there would be a public revolt. Rather than create civil unrest, he hit upon the idea of encouraging his people to gamble and what better way for them to spend their money, than on his personally developed lottery style game called Keno, what a great way to get your subjects to willingly hand over their money to their ruler, all whilst having fun at the same time!

Although Trivial Pursuit may not go back thousands of years to its creation with an elaborate scheme to launch it on an unsuspecting nation, how the game was started is also a little surprising, albeit in a totally different way.

The actual concept of Trivial Pursuit was conceived purely out of the frustrations of a couple of guys who worked in the Canadian press, Chris Haney and Scott Abbott. Chris and Scott both liked playing their games of scrabble. Scott being a sports editor at the time, would most probably have been a bit of a wordsmith and perhaps the game lent him the opportunity to use his skills to outwit his friend Chris.

One can only imagine the dismay and total frustration when setting about to play one day, to discover that some of the game's pieces had vanished. A lot of people would start sulking and let it put them in a bad mood. Not these two though, they figured what the heck, we'll just create a game of our own, and with the help of another couple of buddies, that's exactly what they did, and so the game of Trial Pursuit was conceived!