Trivial Pursuit after Trivial Pursuit, part II

A while back, I posted on a fruitless journey throughout NYC, seeking a non-children's version of Trivial Pursuit.

Since then, after noting how much they are worth on eBay and Amazon (quite a bit), my mother has been searching for them at garage sales. Growing up, we've always had one (sometimes two) garage sales a year, and then we would go to a few occasionally, but lately it has become my mom's hobby. She gets the paper on Thursday when they are being advertised for the weekend, finds the ones she wants to go to, then goes online to find where they are all located, and maps the route. This may be more than a hobby, perhaps a passion, but not yet an addiction--she claims she can stop at any time! In any case, this almost addiction is working out for me. She found a 1981 Genus edition for $2. Playing it is an interesting exercise for a historian, since a lot of the answers are out of date. But trying to settle into a 1981 mentality, trying to think about what was only knowable at the time, and trying to answer accordingly, despite your knowledge of the intervening two and a half decades, is a challenging and, I think, a fun exercise. In a way, this is what I try to do when studying antiquity. So, I found the exercise fun, even though I lost. My brother-in-law ended up winning when we played.

Last weekend, I decided to would go with my mom on her garage sale run, and I, too, was lucky enough to find a Trivial Pursuit for $2, this one being a 2002 20-year anniversary edition. This originally baffled me, because if I had the 1981 copyrighted edition, how could the one from 2002 be the 20-year anniversary? They are 21 years apart! But I discovered that the original version was not released to stores until 1982. I actually thought the game was much older than this, but considering that it has been around nearly my entire life it is easy to think it is timeless. The questions were much more up-to-date, but I oddly found them a bit more difficult than the original edition.

And then today I was in a Target store in Illinois, and there before my eyes was a 2007 edition of Trivial Pursuit. It is sort of a greatest hits edition, containing a set of questions from the 80's edition, the 90's edition, and Pop Culture 2 edition. You get two dice, one tells how far to move, and the other indicates from which edition your question card will be drawn. And it was about $25, which, actually, is not bad. Original editions, like the 2-dollar one my mom found on a garage sale are going for much more! I considered buying it, but then I thought I am already lugging a Trivial Pursuit box back to NYC with me, and I found this at Target! We had looked in a Target during our original pursuit a couple weeks ago! There were many gaps in the board game section, however, and one of them probably was where this three-way Trivial Pursuit was. So, I decided that we just went to the wrong Target, and if we really want to find it, we can find it at another Target in NYC.