he title Star Wars Trivial Pursuit: Classic Trilogy Collector's Edition pretty much says it all. This is a version of Hasbro's world-famous Trivial Pursuit game based on the classic Star Wars Trilogy, complete with a battery-powered model of R2-D2.
For those not familiar with Trivial Pursuit, it's a simple boardgame involving six categories of trivia questions. Each space on the board corresponds to one of the categories, and there are also six "category headquarters." The object of the game is to visit each of the headquarters spaces and correctly answer an appropriate trivia question. Every time players accomplish this, they'll receive one of six colored wedges. The first player to collect all six wedges and then successfully travel to the center board space wins.
The Star Wars version of Trivial Pursuit is played the same way as the regular game, but in this case all the trivia questions relate to the first three movies in the Star Wars film franchise. The categories are divided into Characters, Weapons and Vehicles, History, Geography, Creatures and Aliens, and Wild Card. The board spaces are all Star Wars themed, as are the tokens used to represent each player. The four tokens are pewter replicas of major Star Wars characters: Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and Darth Vader.
While in the regular game players use a six-sided die to determine how many spaces they move per turn, in this version an electronic R2-D2 (called the "R2-D2 randomizer") handles that function. Simply push R2's head, and after a few beeps and whistles he'll spit out a number between one and six.
A not-so-trivial problem
Putting together the popular Star Wars film franchise and Trivial Pursuit seems like a natural. After all, many SF fans pride themselves on their detailed knowledge of George Lucas's landmark films, spouting quotes and facts at every opportunity. And with a story that encompasses dozens of colorful characters, fantastic locations and brilliant creations, there certainly seems to be enough material to mine for a trivia game.
Yet, after sending one of its renowned question writers to Skywalker Ranch for three weeks of intensive research, Hasbro has come up with a game that's good, but unfortunately not great. Some of the 2,400 questions in this game are sharp and on target, such as "What is the first alien species seen in Star Wars: A New Hope?" (Answer: Jawas.) But other questions are either too obvious or too obscure to be much fun. Who doesn't know that Darth Vader is Luke's father? But who could possibly know, just by watching the films, that Yoda's character was called "Minch" in an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back screenplay?
Obviously, in any trivia game there will always be questions that seem too easy to some and too hard to others, but Star Wars Trivial Pursuit suffers from this problem more than it should. Worse still is the fact that many questions share the same answer, so once it comes out that "Admiral Ackbar" led the Rebel fleet, any question with Ackbar as its answer is essentially ruined.
On the plus side, the game is well designed, and the Star Wars-esque pieces are quite nice. And a fair number of questions are well done, with answers that are both surprising and insightful. Overall Star Wars Trivial Pursuit is fun to play, and it will definitely give Star Wars fans a chance to strut their stuff. It's just too bad that a lot of the game's potential seems to go unused.
