Trivial Pursuit Master Edition Review

When Trivial Pursuit was first released for the iPhone, it garnered excellent reviews and for good reason: it's a great conversion of the classic trivia game. iPad owners have waited long enough for their own native version. Fortunately, they've been richly rewarded with Trivial Pursuit Master Edition, a compelling game for any fans of trivia.

The multitude of different modes goes some way to making the $4.99 asking price an easy decision. Comprehensive single player and multiplayer options are available.

For the lone gamer, two great and different ways of playing are possible. There's the classic Trivial Pursuit, we all know and love. The player works their way around the board collecting up wedges of different colors before their opponent. Plenty of customization options are available with the ability to adjust the number of wedges needed to win and whether wedges can be won on all tiles, or just the traditional means of answering correctly on a Headquarters space. Different AI options are available too with easy being extremely simple to beat and hard requiring some impressive efforts in order to beat them.

Also available is my favorite mode of the iPhone edition: Pursuit mode. This one involves a race to the final square in a linear fashion. It's a much more fast paced way of playing and ideal to play in short bursts. Questions, much like the rest of the game, are still focused on the six different genres of questions.

Multiplayer includes a Wi-Fi mode so that players can play with others across their local network. More interestingly is that of the Table Top mode so players can pass the device back and forth. It doesn't work quite as well as playing the game as there's not much reason to chat. Questions are all multiple choice so there's no need for anyone to read out questions or answers. It's not quite as fun as just playing the real thing but it does require less space which is a bonus.

Once the initial batch of questions have been exhausted, plenty of in-app purchases are available to bolster the question supply. These range from a TV pack, Sports, General Knowledge, Encyclopedia and Movies. There's also the intimidating sounding Master Edition pack for the trivia experts.

While I don't think the multiplayer features will be used as much as the real thing (unless space is a big issue), the single player options are very enjoyable. In particular, Pursuit is a satisfying experience that's bound to hook both new and old fans of the game.