Total Trivia

I've been told that I'm a walking encyclopedia of useless knowledge. I love trivia. Those are my favorite games to play, and we have an entire closet of trivia games, most of them being music trivia. My love for trivia is so bad, that my family and friends refuse to play with me because, once again, I'm a walking encyclopedia of useless knowledge. 

So imagine my joy when I was scrolling through Facebook one day and discovered an ad for an app called Total Trivia. It's a trivia game where you compete with others to win prizes and discounts on some rather excellent merchandise. We are talking things in the hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. Obviously I downloaded it!

It has a visually appealing look to it, and you can choose your genres, some with images, making a lot of the genres quite easy if you are a trivia nut like me. 

When you first play, they give you enough tickets to play one game. That, honestly, was slightly disappointing, because there is no way you can get very far with one ticket. You can purchase more, of course, for real money. The amount of tickets you get when you purchase them seems like a pretty good deal initially. but as you advance farther up the leaderboard and the more you play, the more tickets each round costs you. For example, at the end of the night, after only playing for two hours, I ended up spending 600 tickets. Basically, $30 worth. I was also playing for a really nice clock that's retail value was well over $200, so $30 worth of tickets didn't really phase me. If I won, that would be one heck of a deal. You can also purchase "boosts" which will either bring your points up to the leader's points (for a massive amount of tickets), or give you 3X the points per right answer (also a massive ton of tickets). There are daily challenges that give you tickets as well. The particular challenge for this day was 5 tickets for getting so many right in a row. Naturally, I nailed that on the first go. 

Since I know right off hand that this game is exactly like bidding on eBay, I know a lot of people will let you hold the top position straight up until the last 2 or 3 minutes and then swoop in and take it out from under you. I expected that. So I used that tactic as well. I had managed to reach the winning position in the last half hour of the game and sat there for quite some time. Within the last 10 minutes, my position had been taken over, not once, not twice, but three times and I sat in 4th place. I had some tickets left, so I let the timer run down to 2 minutes. Given the length of one round, I figured I could hold the top position if I started a game with a minute or so to spare. I was wrong.

If someone new takes the top position with less than 3 minutes left to the game, it goes into over time and adds 2 extra minutes. I managed the top spot, it added two extra minutes, and then someone swooped in and took the top spot, also adding 2 more minutes. It was then it became clear that this game could go on, literally, forever with this "overtime" feature, and you could easily spend more than the amount of the object on tickets until someone finally gives up and lets the timer run out. Which is what I did. 

After the game, if you don't win the item, you can cash in your discount that you accumulate towards that item. In my case, it was $53 off this $290 clock. I mean, that's still a pretty good deal, but had I not been mindful about buying tickets, I would have spent that much on the tickets and then still lost the clock. Which hit me, at that point, I may as well just buy the stinkin' clock outright. 

So what are my thoughts on this game?

It's a lot of fun! 

Would I play specifically to win prizes?

Negative. Too frustrating, and it takes the fun out of it for me.

People HAVE won. One lady on their Facebook page posted that she's won 70 different items. I imagine she's probably spent thousands of dollars, but she still won. I also did read that there's no cap on winning. What I mean by this, is there are some people who will win an item, the same item, multiple times in a row, and obviously resell them online for the original retail price. This seems to be a common complaint, and if they put something in place that stipulates you are ineligible to win that same object for 30 days, this may cut back on that, although I really doubt it, because after 30 days they can still get the same thing and resell it. 

So, yes, there are some things that can be a little irritating, but if you just love trivia, it's still a fun game to play. I would play this even without other people, just to sharpen my mind and my skills.