I Played The Super Addictive Game Trivia Crack, And Now I Know Why It's Crushing It In The App Store
It's a game called Trivia Crack, and it's super addictive.
I first found out about Trivia Crack when I went home for Christmas last week. My 19-year-old sister and all her friends from college were playing Trivia Crack, and they were shocked I didn't know about it.
Trivia Crack had my mom, who just months ago traded in her archaic flip phone for an iPhone, glued to her screen for hours. I downloaded Trivia Crack to see what the fuss was and soon after, I was hooked.
Trivia Crack, created by a Spanish mobile games company called Etermax and released last fall, looks a little like Trivial Pursuit. You can either connect via Facebook or via email.
It's best to connect to your Facebook, though, because then you can easily find and play against your friends. About 160 of my 800 Facebook friends were listed on Trivia Crack, which is when I first realized how popular it was.
You spin a big wheel to answer trivia questions in six categories - entertainment, art, sports, history, science and geography - written by other users. For each question, you have 30 seconds to select an answer from four possible choices.
As long as you keep answering questions correctly, you keep playing. After every three questions you answer correctly, you get a chance to win a "character" piece from any of the six categories. When you answer a question wrong, it's your opponent's turn.
You can challenge your opponent to steal their character pieces too. The goal of the game is to collect all six character pieces before your opponent does.
The questions in the game are pretty reminiscent of Trivia Pursuit - some are hard, some are softball questions, but most are somewhere in the middle.
The biggest part of the appeal of Trivia Crack is how social the game requires you to be. If you neglect the app for two days, you automatically lose any games you were playing. You can join games with multiple opponents, and the app has a chat feature so you can talk to the person you're playing.
You also have a chance to rate every question you answer - remember, they're user-generated, so they're not perfect - as "fun" or "boring." I got tired of providing feedback for each question pretty fast, though.
The worst aspect of Trivia Crack is all the annoying ads in the game's free version, which is available on both iOS and Android in five languages. There are banner ads and obnoxious, full-screen pop-up ads, but for $2.99 you can upgrade to the ad-free version of the game.
The free version of the app also lets you make in-app purchases to buy tokens and extra spins (you can use tokens to skip questions you don't know the answer to or to narrow down your choices on a particularly hard question).
I don't know that Trivia Crack will be the next Kim Kardashian: Hollywood in terms of its ability to generate revenue, but it's certainly generating a lot of buzz.
At the very least, Trivia Crack is pretty accurately named - I played it for the entire week I was home for Christmas, and I finally had to delete it yesterday to force myself to be productive.