The Quest of the Philosopher's Stone


The Games Gang, Ltd, 1986, 2-4 players, ages 10 and up. Here's a Trivial Pursuit wannabe that takes all of the best elements of that great game and completely screws them up! Where to start? Well, first off, everyone knows that the fun part of trivia games is asking and answering the trivia questions (well, duh). The board movement is wholly superfluous and any complications therein merely detract from the game. Board movement in Trivial Pursuit is simple and elegant. Board movement in this beast is absurdly complex and overwrought. They've introduced this entire system of collecting money and cards and god knows what all that we eventually figured out could be completely ignored. Move to the spaces where you get to answer a question and do so, ignore the rest! I mean, can you imagine a trivia game that has 6 pages of rules?? The next problem is with the questions themselves; instead of fun questions in popular categories like science, and geography and entertainment and sports and whatnot, they give you this book filled with 2000 S.A.T. style word/picture problems (seriously, I am not making this up). So, unlike Trivial Pursuit where the questions are read aloud and everyone gets to play along silently, question-asking in this dog of a game consists of handing the book to a player who looks up a random question, reads it to himself and then calls out "B" or "12" or "Lobotomy" or whatever. He then looks up the answer in the back of the book and says, "Whew, that was tough, but I got it right". Well, the rest of you have to take their word for it because you never got a chance to try to answer the question yourselves. Bad! Bad! Bad!


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