I’m not sure at all where this thread should go. It’s about opinions of a game about books. IMHO? Cafe Society? It’s also fairly mundane and rather pointless. I’m sticking it here and if it’s lost perhaps a kindly mod will give it some warm milk and send it on it’s way.
So has anybody played this?
I’m considering buying a copy. I’m not broke, but also not in a situation where I can spend like the wild and free beastie I internally be. What? Anyway, this would be what I’m spending my current budget for ‘luxuries’ on this month so I just wanted to know what, if anything, you fine people have to say about it. I’m quite a board games person and it has been said that I’m a little picky with what I buy to play.
The reviews I’ve found online are leaning towards the positive, though a fair few admitted ‘literary types’ seem to have found it surprisingly difficult. Most found that their knowledge was only ‘good’ for perhaps one or two of the categories and that the other categories seemed really hard. Moreso than the difference between your good and bad categories in regular Trivial Pursuit.
Now, I love regular Trivial Pursuit and I usually do quite well. My first thought about this edition was that I would enjoy it and find it challenging.I’d certainly rather it was challenging than easy, but if it’s painfully hard for a reasonably well-read person then it may not be worth my while - the people I’ll be forcing… er… inviting to play are quite close to my own level of literary knowledge and we’d like to be able to answer some of the questions at least. 
Also, to the best of my knowledge the game isn’t available (yet?) in Australia but I can get a copy from the US. Seemingly only available there, is it heavily centred on American publications (I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve played a number of trivia games which are very USA-centric and it irritates me a little, not because they don’t have a right to make games like that but because you generally don’t realise that you’re culturally less likely to know half the answers until you’ve payed for it and started playing.) ?
Now that I’ve typed all that out I hope someone has actually played it!
A friend of mine got it as a present for my parents, and I’ll be visiting them next weekend. If you can wait that long, I can post a few cards worth of sample questions to give you a flavor…
On a more meta level, I’ve grown increasingly less fond of Trivial Pursuit in general. So much of it seems to come down to both luck-of-the-roll and luck-of-drawing-the-easy-questions. So many of the questions, particularly the fairly badly written ones, are just auto-gimmes for anyone with fairly decent knowledge… so at the end of the game, win or lose, I rarely get that good satisfied feeling of “well, that was a hard fought game but the winning team clearly just played a bit better today”. Rather, it’s “well, that was some comically poor dice rolling” or “how LUCKY they got a question about Star Trek there”.
(As an example of a bad question, there was one I remember from an edition 10+ years ago that began “what Palestinian”, and of course the answer was Yasser Arafat. What a horribly phrased question… all you need is the first two words, and you pretty much can’t guess wrong…)
If you have a smart and fun group of friends who are into such things, I made some recommendations in this post.
Thanks Max, that would be fantastic if you get a chance!
Also your recommendations sound pretty good, I will definitely check out Carcassone.
I agree somewhat with your reasons for enjoying the game less. We’ve found the newer versions are increasingly easier and with more questions containing ‘buzzwords’ for the answer like your ‘what Palestinian’ example. In those cases, we’ve given permission for the asker to rephrase the question - although that sometimes leads to short-lived disputes about what constitutes a reasonable rephrasing.
We’ve also found that there are more questions per game clustered around a particular topic or person. I think one edition it seemed like every other sport question was about tennis and every other answer for them was a particular player (can’t remember who). So that people like me who don’t follow tennis at all could just answer with his name and often be correct despite having no knowledge of the subject at all. There were definitely other instances of this, too.
For the most part I find that the older versions are the easiest way to make it harder, just because we’re all in our early 20’s and a lot of the more dated questions really force us to think.
The only other ways we’ve found to get around these are to make a rule saying you can’t pick the same colour twice unless you have no choice or if it’s for a pie you haven’t collected - so that you’ll often have to pick a category you’re not great at if you’ve just had a question from your good category. Or to make the board one-way, so you never get a choice and banning entry to the spokes until you have collected all your pie. But these don’t always seem to help.
I never get questions about Star Trek! How unfair! What annoys me most though is that there’s no dedicated ‘last question’ set. It’s possible to get a painfully easy question on the middle square and win the game on it, which I suppose some see as a helpful luck component, but I think those suckers should be hard! But then of course how easy it seems will different to everyone so I guess there’s nothing you can do.
Despite all this I still love to play. 
On a side note my sister always forgets the name of the game and has dubbed it ‘Pie-Race: race for pie!’.