Inducted 2025
Trivial Pursuit’s brain-racking questions have been challenging players for more than 40 years. As individuals or in teams, players race to collect pie wedges in six colors by maneuvering around the board and successfully answering trivia questions. The game rewards a vast breadth of knowledge, with questions ranging from geography to entertainment, from history to art, and from science to sports. 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 thrilling challenge for trivia enthusiasts of all stripes.
Canadian journalists Chris Haney and Scott Abbott invented and developed Trivial Pursuit in 1979. In 1981, the pair began producing the game through 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. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Trivial Pursuit became a major source of home entertainment for adults. People would host Trivial Pursuit parties, inviting their friends and neighbors to come and play. Selchow & Righter sold 1.3 million copies of the game in 1983 and 20 million in 1984. Parker Brothers licensed the game in 1988 before 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.
Trivial Pursuit has since been released in many editions, variants, and formats. The flagship Genus editions 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 piggyback on its success by releasing their own question sets compatible with the game.
Trivial Pursuit’s influence has spread far beyond the realm of board games. A Trivial Pursuit game show ran for one season in the 1990s and was itself adapted back into the board game 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.