I just got a belated birthday present from my kindly colleagues – a copy of Trivial Pursuit: THE 90s, in lurid shiny green box. “The decade of your life…” it says – a truly depressing thought, as a lot of the 90s were personally and impersonally pretty dire. “Remember when it was all about Generation X and the end of the century?” Good work Mr Copywriter.
But that’s not what you want to know: you want to know what kind of fannydangle the makers of TP have come up with to jazz up their game. Trivial Pursuit is successful because it is elegant and simple: these might as well be swear words when you’re trying to shift new bits of kit.
The Trivial Pursuit 90s edition is very heavy, this is partly because its pieces are now made out of shiny metal, though the actual widgets are still garish plastic. The two fit together queasily, which you could also say about the board art, a horrible mix of bad ’90s’ images (omg a sneaker) and trad TP cherubim. The categories are: Global Village, The A List, Breaking News, Retail Therapy, Sound And Vision and Winners & Losers.
Now for the dangle – there is also another layer of complexity added in whereby cards are colour-coded for early, mid and late 90s. Quite how this works I don’t know but to bulk things out more the three decks of cards get their own plastic carry-cases, in the shape of giant grey wedges. The whole thing is enormously ugly, a real triumph of eye-popping garishness over the boring old restraint of the Genus edition.
Oh, and the board has cheapo gold embossing.
Despite this I am of course very eager to play it. Fancy a game?