Learning Day: Winning at Trivial Pursuit (Patreon)

I do not recommend the book Winning At Trivial Pursuit™ by Jeff Rovin. If nothing else, the book smells funny.

Winning At Trivial Pursuit™ is a dingy cheap-o paperback from 1984. Winning At Trivial Pursuit™ is an unauthorized guide to playing the board game Trivial Pursuit™. Thank you to “ProseAndKahn” for surfacing this on the Discord. I will also withdraw that thanks if Winning At Trivial Pursuit™ author Jeff Rovin commands far-right militants to hunt me. Here is a picture of Jeff Rovin:

Hmmm. Foreshadowing! Meanwhile, fluffy fun stuff. Hey Jeff: dumb book idea! Who writes a two hundred fifty page book about winning Trivial Pursuit™? I’m a four-time 'Jeopardy!' Champion and I’m still alienated by that mindset. Admittedly I’m not a big Trivial Pursuit™ player. The game’s fine. I think it’s a generational thing. This book exists because Trivial Pursuit™ dominated American culture before my birth. The game debuted in 1981, and soon outsold every other board game combined. Trivial Pursuit™ also debuted in the brief window between the two iterations of ‘Jeopardy!’ on TV. Nobody had the Internet for writing bar trivia and so on. So everybody flipped out over the opportunity to buy a box of trivia questions. Where else do you get that? Trivial Pursuit™ met a real need. Then, everybody got used to it. I defer to my elders if I’m wrong, but it seems like the hype wore off fast. ‘Seinfeld’ joked about taking Trivial Pursuit™ too seriously in 1992. After a decade, it was just another game. Like Pokemon Go, it never went away – but like Pokemon Go, wow, yikes, why are you still super into Pokemon Go? I often forget Pokemon Go existed. I only remember Pokemon Go existed when I see Hillary Clinton’s name, because she said its name one time. I occasionally see Hillary Clinton in the news, or in an ominous television screencap.

On the author page of this book, Jeff Rovin self-describes as “a Trivial Pursuit™ fanatic.” This is a great way to admit he’s not involved with Trivial Pursuit™ or its creators, otherwise he would say that more impressive thing instead. The author of this book is essentially your friend’s new boyfriend who came to Game Night and “can be so competitive, ha ha, ha ha.” Jeff Rovin seems like one of those friendless Game Night ruiners. However: am I wrong about Jeff Rovin’s vibe? His “Acknowledgements” page, for a book of Trivial Pursuit™ tips, thanks ten entire people.

Wow: Jeff Rovin is a cool guy? Surprise: he’s the kind of guy who would invent a name to help publish a book (more on that later). Also, Jeff Rovin’s Trivial Pursuit™ book invokes sexual intercourse sooner than you would expect.

Here is how I think Jeff Rovin has sex: he asks you why the foolproof sex steps he did at you haven’t achieved the sex victory conditions yet. Maybe your manufacturer misprinted or erred when they produced some of your body parts? By the way, Jeff Rovin knows every real-life example of the “moops” joke from ‘Seinfeld’. Several pages of this book are an index of every inaccurate card in every edition of Trivial Pursuit™ ever published.

Like me, you may have assumed Winning At Trivial Pursuit™ would be a cash-in. Most authors would’ve dashed this off for a quick buck. Jeff Rovin worked so damn hard writing Winning At Trivial Pursuit™. Jeff indexed, reviewed, and criticized all of the thousands of questions ever written for this game. Why? So you can kill your own Game Night. Jeff’s recommendation to you is that you should memorize these errors. That way, the moment one of those cards comes up, you can reveal that you’ve borderline memorized the entire deck of Trivial Pursuit™ cards. Great job doing that, to achieve accuracy! That doesn’t make you some kind of information supervillain, no sir.

You also might’ve asked my next question: “are many of Jeff’s alleged INACCURACIES ON CARDS more of a marginal or subjective error?” My dearest Hotdogger: you already know the answer.

You might wonder how your friends would react, during a Trivial Pursuit™ game, if you reveal you are a Trivial Pursuit™Bot. Here’s what Jeff Rovin says about that: you should keep reading, and memorize every instance of Trivial Pursuit™ recycling a question OR recycling an answer.

Earlier I accused Jeff Rovin of being mechanical in his lovemaking. I made that accusation because SEE ABOVE. Furthermore, SEE NEXT SENTENCES. Jeff’s book about Trivial Pursuit™ uses a lot of military campaign type language. To Jeff, the Trivial Pursuit™ game board is not a foundation for trivia fun. The board is a bullet-riddled hellscape of “headquarters” awaiting “conquest”.

In order to crush your Trivial Pursuit™ opponents, you must read Jeff’s twenty pages of strategies for the complex challenge of [squints] getting six colored wedges.

Jeff’s wedge strategy pages are some of the most aggressive tedium I’ve ever read. Also, Jeff focuses his prose on “rims” and “rim moves” and other rim-centric language. I admit the Urban Dictionary entry for rimming (verb) might be from after Jeff’s generation. Still: you gotta give your book draft a quick pass for accidental sex-word fixations. Literally every section header in the tactics chapter reads like advice for mouth stuff. The movie Sinners doesn’t bring it up this much. Again, Jeff probably thinks he’s writing normal words of his era. But I’m sure I’d get a chuckle in any era with the phrase “You can remain on the rim or you can head for the hub.”

Unlike other sex manuals about pink wedges, Jeff’s Trivial Pursuit™ book acknowledges the importance of the brain. Did you know the brain is the largest erogenous zone? Now set that aside. The brain is chiefly the organ for answering Trivial Pursuit™ questions. Jeff admits you have to answer questions right to win Trivial Pursuit™, then claims he will help you elide the pesky “trivia” element. How will you elide that? First, Jeff recommends focusing on your trivia strengths. Jeff devotes twenty five entire pages to “How To Determine Your Strongest Category”. This tip is both important (you can focus on questions you’re good at!) and pointless (you still have to answer all six kinds of questions). Jeff cannot change the six wedges situation. “Six wedges” is Trivial Pursuit™ Rule One Out Of One. So Jeff pretends a tidal wave of details about the many question categories. Jeff painstakingly indexes every card in every edition of the game, by genre of question. Here’s what that looks like:

Yikes. Jeff might’ve become an early adopter of spreadsheet software just to do this pointless task. Then, Jeff gets creepier. Jeff says that on top of sex and trivia, the brain is also useful for psychological domination. Winning At Trivial Pursuit™ zooms from an introduction promising this book doesn’t de-fun the game, to an entire chapter of brutal mental warfare.

The first page of that chapter is a red flag. Jeff promises these mental tactics are not “grossly underhanded or unfair” (italics his). In other words, they are underhanded and unfair. Then within that first page Jeff explains how to “Force Your Opponent Into A Wrong Answer”. His top advice for you, in a casual trivia game with no money on the line, is to hurry and mind-game your friend into feeling too stupid to retrieve information they otherwise know.

As you can see, there’s also an aside right before that, recommending that you make sure your opponent hasn’t read this book. I would give a thousand bucks to hear Jeff expand on that parenthetical. How do you make sure your friend hasn’t read a book? Midday home invasion and shelf inspection while they’re at work? Tie up and interrogate their favorite Waldenbooks cashier? Or in the case of this specific book, ask yourself whether your friend is the kind of asshole who’d read this? Jeff doesn’t say. He does move on to a thrilling invention. Jeff Rovin parallel-invented the standardized X Dot Com replies of Elon Musk.

I think I turned up a piece of good news here. Jeff Rovin’s book affirms Trivial Pursuit™ is not all that well-designed of a game. Jeff wrote the most obsessive, fastidious Trivial Pursuit™ guide of all time, and still runs out of things to say halfway through. He stretches for more content by pitching 15 new house rules:

This list looks impressive until you read them. Almost all of them are “make your wedge-collecting game piece move differently”. What else would new rules involve? It’s just trivial questions plus colors. The Trivial Pursuit™ board offers very little room to explore, maneuver, or get creative. Sort of like the human anus. (I’m not trying to work blue. Anus metaphors turn inevitable after you read five hundred rimming-adjacent instructions.) Next, Jeff admits Jeopardy! is a much better game. This sounds obvious, until you remember this book got printed slightly before the beloved Alex Trebek television show hit airwaves. Jeff isn’t saying TV is better than a board game. He’s saying Trivial Pursuit™ is worse than the vestigial board game adaptation of the 1960s version of Jeopardy!.

My dear Hotdogger: is your mind doing ok with all this? If it hasn’t crumbled yet, you may remember Jeff’s author bio. Jeff self-describes as the creator of Games Magazine and the future creator of A Second Magazine About Trivia Questions. I must now accuse Jeff of double-dipping. The final three entire chapters of Winning At Trivial Pursuit™ explore the separate topic of writing and selling trivia questions.

In 1984, the only institutions purchasing trivia questions were the makers of Trivial Pursuit™, bars on weeknights, and Jeff’s one-and-a-half magazine hustles. He wrote these questions for two and a half paychecks. There is one other possible reason to write Trivial Pursuit™ questions, which is to solve the issue of running out of fresh questions to play with your friends. If Jeff Rovin has thought of that, it’s only for the purpose of complete Trivial Pursuit™ domination. If he doesn’t write and print new questions, his victims have an excuse to stop playing and undo their leg chains.

Speaking of Jeff Rovin’s victims: every living American. Did you know Jeff Rovin wrote other books? However many books you’re imagining, Jeff wrote more. For example, twenty-two Tom Clancy novels. Tom Clancy is an absolute book factory, and Tom Clancy still tagged his Jeff Rovin collab titles with the extra phrase “Op Center”. That’s Tom doing us a kindness. You’ll see “Op Center” and either know which titles to avoid, or avoid those titles by accident because “Op Center” sounds like a telemarketing scheme. Jeff Rovin also wrote a trilogy of Gillian Anderson fantasy novels. Gillian Anderson is not a different lady. It’s the Gillian Anderson you’re thinking of. Jeff Rovin’s also reached the (grim version of the) Stephen King Zone, where he’s tried pen names because his own name occupies too many of the bookstore’s spines. “Jim Grand” and “Harry Bergen” and “Jeffrey and Lila Dubinsky” don’t exist. They are all Jeff Rovin. Also, I didn’t know you can be a pen couple. That bothers me extra and I can’t quite figure out why. Is it legal to make yourself “Jeffrey and Lila Dubinsky” without a second set of hands? Either Jeff Rovin anonymized a spouse who he wrote children’s fiction with, or his publisher told him nobody trusts a sole male maniac around children.

Oh right: every living American. We’re all living in a world worsened by Jeff Rovin. That’s why I feel empowered to poop all over his career, even though he’s still alive. If he reads this he can go suck a lemon. Rim a lemon, Jeff. Here’s why I say that: until this part of the column, Jeff wasn’t hurting anybody. Writers often take the gigs they can get. We’re all drowning in capitalism, and artificial intelligences. Jeff Rovin might say he wrote this to make a living, like anybody else. But Jeff Rovin has no morals. He isn’t merely typing until his fingers fall off in exchange for his bowl of gruel. Jeff Rovin is the longtime editor of Weekly World News. Yes, that Weekly World News. Much like the identity and beauty of Gillian Anderson, your mind recalled that publication with perfect clarity. Fun fact: an online document listing Jeff Rovin’s credits says he was Weekly World News’s "Freelance Editor-In-Chief". “Freelance Editor-In-Chief” is a level of media industry collapse I never thought possible. The desperate lone human feeding the ChatGPT that populates Cracked Dot Com in 2025 must still have a better job title than “Freelance Editor-In-Chief”. Jeff Rovin settled for that job title twenty years ago. Jeff Rovin accepted that ignominy back when media existed. Back when people needed a collegiate e-mail address to sign up for Facebook. Astonishing stuff. And if that kind of social destabilization wasn’t enough, here’s how Jeff Rovin spent the fall of 2016:

What a monster. Also, what an ignoramus? Is Jeff aware how much money you can make as a 2020s conservative grifter? You can get richer than Croesus, if you do that grifting in the medium of the Internet. Jeff Rovin positioned himself for that. He ascended the heights of Mount Trumpworld, one time, as an October 2016 Hannity guest… and then went right back to slaving away in the lowest dregs of book publishing. Why did he sell his soul for so little? I can’t figure it out. Jeff Rovin has to be worse at understanding the media business than any other American. His entire income from boosting U.S.-style fascism is one Hannity appearance fee, plus any Nature Valley bars he grabbed in the green room, minus the cost of going to and from the midtown Manhattan studios of Fox News. How is Jeff this dumb? I would call him a “Nazi”, but an elderly literal 1940s Nazi might know more of the basics of how the world works.

Anyway congratulations, Jeff Rovin. Your horrible book about Trivial Pursuit™ did nothing to free you from the freelance treadmill. You’ve turned Trivial Pursuit™ into a game I associate with one of the best people on Earth AND one of the worst people on Earth (you). And to top it all off, you probably only met Gillian Anderson over the phone.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mickey Lowman, who knows the puruit of banal information is indeed trivial and therefore beneath him, but does it anyway because NOBODY TELLS MICKEY "FIST OF THE FOREST" LOWMAN WHAT TO DO!

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