My regular readers know that I mostly review books, DVDs, and records aimed at groovy ghouls, retro rockers, and kooky cultists here on Psychobabble, but I'm branching out ever so slightly with this post to write my first game review. Turner Classic Movie's Ultimate Movie Trivia Challenge doesn't stretch too far from the usual Psychobabble subject of retro-pop culture, but it did force me to alter my usual solitary review approach. So I wrangled my wife, Elise Nussbaum, for assistance. I didn't simply choose her because she is conveniently located or basically the only other adult human I talk to (although both of those things are true); she was also the perfect candidate because she is a former three-day Jeopardy champion, so I knew she would go easy on neither TCM's Ultimate Movie Trivia Challenge nor me.
Game play is refreshingly simple in an age of games with unnecessarily convoluted rules. One player draws a card with four questions. The other player randomly selects a number from one to four, and the question-asker asks the corresponding question. Each correctly answered question earns a player one point, and on it goes until one player accumulates a set number of points. The rules suggest 10, 12, or 15.
Each card is devoted to one of eight possible categories: The Great Films, Leading Ladies, Leading Men, Directors, Cult Classics, Supporting Players, Behind the Scenes, and Unforgettable Lines. Frank Miller, the writer of Casablanca: As Time Goes By, composed the questions. His answers are fairly extensive, some with additional trivial tidbits that aren't exactly necessary for gameplay, but they can be pretty specific. The answer to a question asking how Rhoda Penmark got her penmanship medal in The Bad Seed specified the name of the kid Rhoda offed. Even though Elise only answered, "She killed a kid," I gave her the point because I'm such a marvelously benevolent husband.
Elise thought that allowing the question-reader to select the question instead of having the answerer do it randomly would improve play. We both agreed that there could have been a bit more give in the questions; there could have been some subtle clues to help you make an educated guess if you don't, for example, have the scripts of A Letter to Three Wives or Queen of Outer Space memorized. But there's such a mix of film types and difficulty levels that the game is very playable and quite a bit of fun for anyone into twentieth-century films from indisputable classics like Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey to stuff that isn't quite as well-crafted, like Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. And since I won our game, I certainly can't complain. Of course, had the game's topic not been one of the two things I actually know a lot about, Elise would have slaughtered me, because she's a genius.
