I Got 6

I spent the evening at Buffalo Wild Wings, playing NTN's "Six" game. "Six" is a general knowledge game in six categories. If I correctly understand my NTN history, the game used to be "Trivial Pusuit", until whatever licensing deal they had expired. So now they just have a game with 6 categories very similar to the original 6 in Trivial Pursuit. It's a great game.

Six has 2 special rounds which raise the game up from a simple one-hour multiple choicefest. Round 2 is a matching game. You get a category; for instance, tonight had match these foreign states to their countries, and then you have to match them up. Pretty simple, but this round works as a great diagnostic for what you don't know.

Here were tonight's rounds:

Science: multiplication problems. This is the second time in the last couple of months that I've seen this. Seriously guys. Knock it off.

Geography: The foreign states mentioned above.

Entertainment: Divorced couples. Nothing more entertaining than broken marriages.

History: It'll come to me. Oh yeah, Time's Man of the Year, matching man to year.

And the last two, which I bombed following perfect scores on the first 4:

Sports: Match the NBA team to its arena.

So, seriously. Could you do this? Here were the teams:

Timberwolves (1)
Grizzlies (2)
Trail Blazers (3)
Bucks (4)
76ers (5)
Kings (6)

I knew the T-wolves, because I'm here in Minnesota, and I'm not that lame. Having the arenas listed was some help, in that somehow I recognized the Trail Blazers arena. And I guessed one of the other 4 correctly. I like questions I don't know the answer to.

This is one area where Wikipedia shines: providing lists of related things to study. I look up Wachovia Center, and there at the bottom is a list of all the NBA arenas, as well as all the NHL Arenas and more links to other leagues and other lists. Perfect for studying/beefing up your knowledge. And thus, the NTN game serves as diagnostic.

So I've resigned myself to dropping some points during the sports round, because I make it up with the Arts/Literature question. I work in a bookstore, and thus I know more-than-average about modern fiction. If the question is about popular books, I can make up my points right there. Except that tonight, it was:

Arts/Lit: Complete the Jeffery Deaver novel titles.

Uh-oh Chongo. This isn't like matching up the Janet Evanovich titles like I saw a while back. I'd actually heard of those, and they all have numbers in and are easy to remember. For this round I had to guess, and I only got 4 of 6. Nuts. Oh, well. So I look them up on Wikipedia, and I discover that the 6 novels listed all feature the character Lincoln Rhyme. So I've learned something I can use there.

The other twist round is the final wagering round. You assign point values 1000 to 6000 to the 6 categories. The scores can really fluctuate in this round, since usually up to this point the game is pretty close. (The players at BW3 in Mankato are great, and I love playing there. I'm usually near the top of the scoreboard, but I have to stay on my toes. And if any of them somehow find this, MANWHO says Hi.) Tonight I was quite a bit ahead, but I dropped my 5000 and 6000 questions, and I ended up in third. Dropping the science question alone was a 4400 point swing. Almost impossible to make up.

Anyway, Six is the Thursday night premium NTN game, and it's one of my favorites.

The answers to the NBA arenas question can be found in the comments.