Many of us feel that we have a particular superpower in our everyday lives. For some, it might be detecting the gas station with best price without using an app. For others, it’s finding the prime clothing item on a markdown rack that’s just your size. Back in the 1980s, my special skill was my ability to retain and retrieve all sorts of factual flotsam and jetsam—perfect for excelling at Trivial Pursuit. For a time, Trivial Pursuit became a standard feature of dinner parties and social gatherings among my friends. And I developed a reputation for being the guy who could nail the stickiest details and fill his pie-shaped playing piece first. In fact, my reputation got to the point where, at one party, the host declared, “It’s everybody against Chris!” as we launched a game of Trivial Pursuit. I didn’t know whether to feel flattered that it took the combined brain wattage of all the other guests to equal mine or hurt that I was considered the enemy that they needed to band together against to bring to his (intellectual) knees. I can’t recall whether I won that particular game, but I appreciated that Trivial Pursuit had established a forum where I could excel—unlike every physical education class I’ve ever attended.
Now, I look back with fondness at my years as a Trivial Pursuit pro, especially given that Trivial Pursuit was one of the 2026 inductees into the National Toy Hall of Fame. In part, that award is recognition that Trivial Pursuit’s brain-racking questions have been challenging players for more than 40 years. The game rewards a vast breadth of knowledge, with questions ranging from geography to entertainment, from history to art, and from science to sports. As individuals or in teams, players race to collect pie wedges in six colors by maneuvering around the board and successfully answering trivia questions. After accumulating wedges of each color, players must land on the board’s central space and correctly answer a question in a category of their opponents’ choosing. Available in various editions on a wide array of topics, Trivial Pursuit is a challenge for trivia enthusiasts of all stripes.
The story began in 1979 when Canadian journalists Chris Haney and Scott Abbott invented and developed Trivial Pursuit. In 1981, the pair began producing the game under their new company, Horn Abbott Ltd. After an initial print run of 1,100 copies, they licensed the game to publisher Selchow and Righter in 1982 who sold 1.3 million copies of the game in 1983 alone—right about the time that Trivial Pursuit became an obsession among my friends and a major source of home entertainment for adults in general. Parker Brothers licensed the game in 1988, and later Hasbro purchased the full rights in 2008. By 2023, the game had sold more than 100 million copies, making it the best-selling Canadian board game of all time.
Over the years, Trivial Pursuit has been released in many editions, variants, and formats. The flagship Genus editions regularly refresh the classic categories with new questions updated for changing times. Other editions remap the game’s iconic question colors onto new categories, from 1983’s sports edition to 1997’s Star Wars edition. Trivial Pursuit’s dominance in the trivia board game space has even led other companies to piggy-back on its success by releasing their own question sets compatible with the game.
Trivial Pursuit’s influence has spread even beyond the realm of board games. A Trivial Pursuit game show ran for one season in the 1990s and was itself adapted back into a tabletop version called Trivial Pursuit Game Show Edition. The game show was revived in 2024 with host LeVar Burton. Video game adaptations of Trivial Pursuit have appeared as arcade cabinets and on home systems from the Xbox 360 to the Nintendo Switch. Hasbro even offers a Trivial Pursuit online daily quiz, in the vein of other popular daily games like Wordle. Frequent updates and innovations continue to keep Trivial Pursuit relevant.
Congratulations to Trivial Pursuit for its place of honor in the National Toy Hall of Fame. And please keep me in mind if you need someone to fill a seat around the table when you’re ready for your next Trivial Pursuit match.