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Students play Trivia Pursuit

 

Not long after applauding Paul Galbraith’s classical-guitar performance at the Fall Concert, the students of Thomas Aquinas College, California, filled the St. Cecilia Hall recreation room to meet their tutors for a traditional game of Trivial Pursuit. Every year after the concert, students and tutors spend the evening together in lively competition, showing off their extracurricular knowledge. The tutors’ team, headed by Dr. Michael Letteney, Dean of the California Campus, occupied a long table on one end of the room, where the game board sat. The students, led by senior Eli Hunt (’25), packed into the rest of the room to enjoy the game and jump in to help answer questions for their team.

In an attempt to level the playing field between the teams, the questions were pulled randomly from two combined trivia decks, one from a 1996 edition of the game and the other from 2016. The older, wiser tutors, equipped with doctorates and life experience, faced off against their younger opponents, who made up for their lack of experience with a greater familiarity of popular culture, plus sheer numbers and enthusiasm.

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The teams tackled an eclectic series of trivia questions from six categories: Entertainment, Art & Literature, Science & Nature, Geography, History, and Sports & Leisure. In order to win, they needed to maneuver their game pieces toward the center of the board, answering questions along the way, and obtain one “pie piece” from every category. Answer a question wrong, and it became the other team’s turn. Both sides took turns consulting among themselves, pooling their knowledge, and searching through distant memory to come up with obscure facts and the occasional blind guesses. 

Amid plenty of good-natured teasing between the tutors and the students, the teams hazarded answers to questions about celebrities, TV shows, historical events, brands of candy, and much more. They named the first full-length film ever made with spoken dialogue, the largest landlocked country, and the four ghosts from Pac-Man, among other trivial matters. The game was close, but in the end the students hit home on a tricky final question, and the room exploded into cheers from the triumphant students. 

For many of the students, the best part of the night (besides the sweet taste of victory, of course) was having fun with their tutors outside the classroom. “I love seeing the students and tutors interact,” said junior Gianna Langley (‘27). “It’s a lot of fun!”