One of the most successful board games of all time was always going to be a good fit for iPad. It's astonishing only that it took so long to make it to Apple's tablet.
Trivial Pursuit Master Edition, released on October 27, brings the fun of the board game version to life — but I'd go one step further; I reckon it's even better than the board version. Without having to set up the board and futz with "pies" or question card boxes, the game is immediately accessible on iPad.
Rolling the dice is an animated gesture. You pick it up and flick. This brings a nice sense of the real world to gameplay. You can play against real opponents in tabletop mode (as in share the iPad as you would the board game) or settle in to a game against the iPad. This gives the electronic version one-up on the board game. If you're short of trivia-loving friends, this is a great solution to getting your fix.
The sticking point for any variation of Trivial Pursuit is the questions. Too many hard questions and the game loses its fun factor, too few hard questions and the diminished challenge also erodes the appeal of the game. It seems to me the question cards are weighted towards the easy side and I found myself heading to the centre way faster than I would with any of the versions I have of the board game. Of course, any assessment of the ease or difficulty of Trivial Pursuit questions is highly subjective. One person's "What's the name given to the flight path of a ballistic missile?" is another person's "What colour is a banana?".
Which leads to the question: Is there enough fun in Trivial Pursuit for iPad to warrant the $2.99 asking price? (It was $5.49 on release.) Yes, but not if you're already a trivia master or if you like your trivia questions with a heavy dose of Australian content and relevance.
Also, there's a strong leaning towards movie questions, which tend to appear in categories where they don't really belong, which kind of compromises the "master" part of the game's name.
Trivial Pursuit is tailor-made for in-app purchasing. Just like the board game, a new set of questions can bring the game alive again once you've worked through the bundled set. However, so far, there's only one expansion pack on offer. Let's hope the developers add more in the future. They'd be crazy not to. (Update: further expansion packs are now available.)
I tested the game on an iPad 1 and it played fine. This, despite a lot of comments on the iTunes Store that it doesn't work on iPad 1, so don't let the Negative Nancies there dissuade you from indulging in this evergreen.
If I have any complaint, it would be that the method of moving your marker, in which you tap on the space on the board as indicated by the game as a result of your dice roll, sometimes draws a sluggish response and requires some awkward tapping to get it to accept your input. It's a minor quibble, though, and perhaps iPad 2 owners will enjoy a better experience.
