Triviador fixed and Seal of Approval Reinstated

A quick update to Monday’s post about Triviador.  The developers of the game quickly got in touch with me and assured me that they would get to the bottom of the problem.  It would appear that they’ve fixed the majority of the problems and that Triviador is back to being the awesome Trivial Pursuit meets Risk game I fell in love with.  I re-award it my Seal of Approval and have re-ranked it on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

See, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Triviador was developed by THX Games

Triviador stripped of Indie Gamer Chick Seal of Approval

Update: Triviador is fixed and the Seal of Approval has been reinstated.

Well, this is a first.  Last month, I reviewed a really fun Facebook game called Triviador, which I awarded the Indie Gamer Chick Seal of Approval to.  I’ve never had to retract my Seal of Approval from a game after it won it.  Unfortunately, I have no choice but to do so with Triviador.  In November, the game received an update, taking it from its beta stage into a more polished, final version.

Unfortunately, the updated graphics are the only positive thing that came from the change over (and they’re not really that much better).  Triviador is so full of glitches now that unfair losses or cheap wins earned when another player gets dumped out of the game are sometimes more prevalent than a fully functional round.  The chief problem is disconnects.  Triviador frequently hangs up and disconnects players.  At least once every four games I was disconnected.  On games where it didn’t happen to me, it would typically happen to one of the other players, which eliminates the thrill of victory and the entire point of the game all at once.  This only happens during the fastest-finger tie-breaker questions, but it happens constantly.  This problem also doesn’t seem to discriminate between different operating systems or web browsers.  Often, the disconnects seem to be tied to using the premium boosters that you can either acquire through gameplay or purchase with real money.  I spent $9 to buy a stockpile of parrot and telescope boosters, but the game most frequently locks up when attempting to use those.  At the time I bought them, Triviador was stable and playable.  I wouldn’t have bought them in the game’s current state.  Nobody would have.

Such a shame.  Triviador was a wonderful game.  But the latest update is unstable.  In a game where experience points are based around winning streaks, making sure wins and losses are achieved via fair means is very important.  Unfortunately, those streaks are impossible to maintain because you’re unlikely to be able to play too many games before getting taken out via a disconnect.  For this reason, I have to strip Triviador of its Indie Gamer Chick Seal of Approval and remove it from the Leaderboard.  I have never seen a game so thoroughly ruined by an attempt at improving it in my life.

Triviador

Update 2: Triviador’s problems are fixed and the game’s Indie Gamer Chick Seal of Approval has been reinstated. Don’t fuck it up again, guys.

Update: Triviador updated in November, leaving its Beta stage of development. Unfortunately, the update has wrecked the game, causing numerous problems with disconnects for all players regardless of operating system or web browser.  For this reason, I have to strip Triviador of the Indie Gamer Chick Seal of Approval at this time. The problem has been ongoing for weeks. The developers are not active in Social media and I can’t see any acknowledgement of problems. If the game is fixed, I’ll reinstate the Seal of Approval. For more details, read this follow-up notice. The review below is no longer accurate.

Triviador is a Facebook-based trivia game that seems to be permanently locked in a beta-stage. I discovered it Friday night while talking with DefunctGames.com owner Cyril Lachel about which board games could transition to Facebook the best. You would think stuff like Scattergories would be a perfect fit amongst the types of social-oriented, quick-and-simple to play fair you see on Facebook. You would be wrong. Hell, Facebook doesn’t even have a board game category. It does have Word & Trivia, which mostly contains knock-offs of Scrabble and its cousins. You’ll also find a lot of stuff based on game shows, though the Facebook versions are often so divorced from the play mechanics of the show that they’re unrecognizable. As if they’ve seen one episode of the show, years earlier, while under general anesthesia, and tried to create their own version based on that limited knowledge.

Owned.

So tracking down classic board games and game shows on Facebook was a bit of a bust, but then I found Triviador. Think of it as Risk meets Trivial Pursuit. At the start of the game, three players are randomly assigned a spot on the map for their castle to go. You then play four rounds to determine how many troops you get and where they start on the map. These rounds are played similar to the fastest finger questions from who Wants to be a Millionaire, only every answer is a number. After these four rounds play out, another three rounds of battles take place. One at a time, players choose a space adjacent to a space they occupy. A duel takes place featuring a multiple choice question, with the winning player taking over the space. If both answer correctly, it goes to another fastest finger question. If this is a draw as well, the first person to enter in the answer gets the space. During a final fourth round of duels, players can choose any space on the board. This is significant, because if you take over an opponent’s castle, they’re out of the game and you get all their points. It also sort of defeats the point of the first couple rounds, doesn’t it?

Castles require three “hits” to take over. I found the best strategy to be putting up a perimeter around my base and playing a defensive-oriented game, then taking over on points during the last round. For the most part, this served me well. The only time I really lost a game is when I was slow on the draw. Or when I didn’t read the questions right. Or when the game decided to troll me with an endless parade of questions related to operas or Broadway musicals. No, I don’t fucking know what year Frank Lloyd Wright was born, nor was I even remotely in the ballpark. Wasn’t that the guy who made The Sims? No? Shut up, Cathy? Okay.

Like I said earlier, Triviador is technically in beta right now, and has been for around two years. I didn’t really come across any glitches or issues, besides the whole “pick any space you want to attack, essentially nullifying the previous three rounds” bullshit. Mostly though, I marveled at just how dumb some people were. Get this: if you knock someone’s castle over, you occupy the space it stood on, which is now worth 1,000 points. If you lose a space, you lose that amount of points and the person taking it over gets them. So, let’s say we’re down to the very last question of the very last round. We’ll say the score is 3,000 to 2,000, with me in the lead. Now, you can go for my castle, which still has a full three hit-points left on it, or you can go for the space worth 1,000 points, of which you only need to beat me once. What do you do? Well, if you’re 90% of the mouth-breathers I played against, you go for the castle, giving me three chances to keep my lead instead of one all-or-nothing final question. But hell, sometimes the game could be tied and the person would still go for the castle, instead of any other piece on the board. Now, mind you, if I win the duel (instead of having us both miss the question), I get 100 points, which means I win. Meanwhile, a player who is out of contention to win has a man on the field who is worth enough points for my opponent to win the game, but he gets totally ignored.

I don’t know why that bugs me, but it does. I can forgive someone not knowing what the chemical symbol for Tin is or what year Phantom of the Opera debuted on Broadway. Quite frankly, I didn’t know them either. But the vast majority of players I encounter on Triviador didn’t have the slightest bit of common sense when it came to strategy. But, it was totally worth it for those nail-biting match-ups that the game sometimes produced. Heck, I even lost a couple and I’m still utterly addicted to Triviador. If you want to know where I’ve been over the last week, there’s your answer.  I also never had to put a single dime into Triviador to binge-play it. You get five games at a time, with reloads coming pretty quickly. As you start to level up more, you’ll run out of the five freebie games quickly, but you practically trip over “bonus adventures” (I currently have a stockpile of 8 built up), and there’s multiple versions of the game that you can switch between on the off-chance that you completely run out of games but still want to keep going. Triviador is the first really good Trivia game on Facebook and worth your time. Hell, it’s worth it just to laugh at those people who think Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for assassinating President Kennedy.

Triviador was developed by THX Games

Triviador is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.