Very Briefly

Can a trivia game exist with just 18 cards instead of 800? With Peter C. Hayward’s Apropos series, yes, it can! The Apropos series (such as Apropos of Board Games and Apropos of Movies) avoids common annoyances in many trivia games and is approachable to all, including the trivia-weary.

Briefly

There’s a simple play loop at the heart of an Apropos game, where everyone figures out, together, a game/movie/etc that fits the conditions on the cards on the table; and then those conditions are altered slightly, and the group works together again to come up with a new item.

And that heart of an Apropos game is exactly what’s so brilliant about Apropos.

Usually when people make trivia games, those games use hundreds of cards for variety. But Apropos not only uses combining conditions to create that variety among fewer cards, it uses the simple “not” to make those combinations extra flexible; playing into that (🥁) mechanically creates this push and pull that you can get in games like Pictionary, 20 Questions, or Charades – a huge part of those games’ appeal – but in just a few cards.

This combination of conditions, plus the ability to combine using “not”/negating, increases the ability to express something actually pretty complex without forcing people to draw or perform or come up with cunning new questions.

The Apropos games as a result are super approachable and extremely gamer friendly across a wide spectrum of people. Apropos also avoids one of the pitfalls of trivia games: the focus on minutia and oddball facts can often put people off if they aren’t a trivia head. But we’ve all seen movies, and gamers have definitely played a lot of games.

There is a ton to recommend the Apropos ethos for. It will be excellent in both mainstream areas (music, books, etc) as well as even more niche areas (board games, sports, video games, even areas of science or history or art etc).

I am not a fan of trivia games even though I know a lot of weird trivia – a game’s no fun if the other folks disengage from it, as I rarely focus on winning as much as the interactive experience of a multiplayer game. But I am a fan of Apropos.

Apropos is also pleasing to me solo, which is very odd for a trivia game. I think due to its flexible nature in terms of answers, even with the same cards, I’m not just memorizing questions and answers, I’m thinking about items in a category I love – whether it be board games or books. And that’s a whole lot more engaging than multiple choice quizzes.

Lục Bát

What has a folding board?
Viticulture, a game I love.
So let us add to that:
What also has but a single
Word as its title? Hm.
New York Zoo. But let’s add:
What also has cards in your hand?

I could while away nights
With friends just about anywhere,
With friends-to-be everywhere,
As we chatter about things
That we find most dear, helped
Through a language most fluid
In just eighteen cards.