Game Week 1 Review: CXOs, Circuit Diagrams and the Calydonian Boar Hunt

Everything we covered in the first week of the league.

Hi everyone. Welcome back to B612 Quiz Reviews. I feel like I've been away from quizzing for a while too, so this post will be about you and me rediscovering this amazing sport again. Welcome home.

Game Week 2 is On!

Draws can be checked in the usual place, and some new names have been added. Welcome! The Game Week will run from 8pm on Tuesday, 13th Feb to 10pm on Monday, 19th Feb. Schedule your games soon so you can sign up to read a few games too!

Game Week 1 Review

Let's call these blogposts reviews instead of ‘analyses’ since I'm writing the majority of them after reading a couple of games but before the final stats. I'm doing this for practical reasons. I would get very little time to write if I insisted on writing only after seeing the stats. I'd also be more likely to get late, and that's just one step away from missing a post outright.

The unintended benefit of this decision is that I'm coming to these numbers as new as you are. If we f*cked up the levelling, you'll see our honest reaction to it.

Having a diverse, culturally healthy, overall happy setters group is essential to creating perfectly levelled quads. We don't know how great our setters group is in this regard, but I guess the data will tell us.

This week's set was made by our incredible team of setters, made richer by the addition of some new members this season. Thejaswi Udupa, Utkarsh Rastogi, Soumya Sharma, and Rajat Gururaj all returned to contribute a quad each this week. Our newest additions Debasmita Bhowmik and Shanine Salmon submitted one and two respectively, and the heavy lifting was done by Mimir celebs Dhruv Mookerji and Vikas Plakkot, who submitted 3 quads each. I got two in too, and the team then worked together to edit the questions and fine-tune the framing, marshalled by Vikas.

Let's see what the result of all that work is. Games played on Monday may have been left out of the analysis.

All the data was cleaned up and made easily consumable by the ample generosity and seasonal free time of B612 favourite, Arpita Shetty.

• All feedback is welcome here: Link

• Question set is now public: Link

Key for Newbies

For each quad, we'll be sharing a list of answers and the following numbers:

• Opportunity: Number of people who had the opportunity to answer the question. They may have attempted, or they may have passed, but it still counts as an opportunity.

• Correct: Number of people who got it right

• %Correct: % value of the previous two numbers. This is a good approximation of the question's difficulty.

The objective is that each quad should have a ‘smooth’ difficulty gradient, meaning the first question (L1) should be the easiest and have the highest %Correct value, the second (L2) be slightly harder and have a lower %Correct, and so on.

The ideal %Correct values aren't fixed, since we sometimes intend for a quad to be easier or harder than the others, but a nice gradient would probably be:

• L1: >50%, L2: 40-50%, L3: 20-40%, and L4: <20%.

Quads 13, 14, and 15 are non-ascending, which is a fancy way of saying they are supposed to be all of the same difficulty. They can be easy or they can be hard, they just need to be roughly level.

Almost none of these ideals are actually met in practice, but this is the target anyway since it results in perfectly level difficulty for all 4 seats in the quiz. When we're going through the numbers, I will see any difficulty gradient with L4<L3<L2<L1 and call it a ‘good’ gradient.

Quick Stats for the Week

Seat Averages

Seats were about as level as can be hoped for. A musket, i.e. scoring 4/4 in a quad, was less likely in Seat 3 than the others.

Game Score Distribution

The right-leaning nature of this curve (as opposed to a perfect bell shape) shows that the set was more suited for experienced quizzers than it was for newbies. Then again maybe that’s how it should look for a quiz league. Newbies are always the bravest.

For reference, here’s the week-on-week game score distribution for last season. You can see that the shape of last season’s Game Week 1 is strikingly similar!

Season 6

1. Topography of Land Divisions

A very typically creative geography quad by Vikas. Identify the state from its map and a couple of hints. Each of the borders presented was once no more than a random drawing on a map, a nice reminder that the world and its borders are very much a result of arbitrary choices.

• The Ottoman Empire was gettable from the timeline and the map's boundaries, although a lot of people reacted by saying they expected more of Turkey to be part of the Empire shown in 1916.

• Bottleneck feels like a great question because of all the hints in the framing, but whether you get the point probably depends more on your risk appetite that day. We hadn't used any word-length clues, so guessing "Bottleneck" might not have seemed worth a bonus attempt. L4 by design.

• Transjordan was a really cool funda ("Winston's Hiccup"), even if I wouldn't have gotten it myself.

Three questions in, this is starting to feel like it might've been a hard quad, but I'm not the best person to judge a geography quad anyway.

• Maluku was pretty difficult for an L2, and I think ending the set on this question might've been a bad idea, since the default Mimir scorer doesn't display the answer to the last question, so many players will end up having to ask their readers to paste it into the Zoom chat.

  

A Quick Digression

Have you seen Arnold D'Souza's new Mimir scoring app? MAJOR updates over the Wikiquiz site, in terms of both features and UX. I love that displaying questions is built into the site, so readers don't need to install a separate plugin, and I love that the site retrieves details about the set (number of rounds, players and questions) from the TSV file itself. It's a perfect replacement for Mimir Friendlies, although a little more work is needed before it can be used for league games. But soon, I hope!

2. The 2023 Repealing and Amending Act

We try to limit ourselves to two "India" quads per week, although it turns out the classification of quads into "India" and "non-India" is not always simple. This quad topic screams India quad, but the questions were each written to be easily attempted by our foreign participants as well. Some real skill went into framing these, so well done Soumya Sharma. I'll be copying each of the questions here too.

One of the laws included in the 76 repealed Indian laws in 2023 is one from 1950 that forbade the possession of copper wire, specifically between 2.4 and 3.5 millimetres, used for a particular purpose of strategic importance. What was the wire's specific use case, that no longer has relevance in the modern world?

Telegraph wire is a reasonable guess.

In 2023, the Indian government repealed 76 outdated laws through an act of Parliament. One of the laws included in this is one from 1881 that granted permission to the government to remove any object or vessel blocking the [Blank]. The blank refers to the navigable channel within a bay or harbour, a term that is also used for a part of golf course. What's the good word?

Fairway falls into that nice intersection between golf and harbour terminology, and many were able to guess it while being familiar with only the former and not the latter use.

In the 76 repealed laws by the Indian government in 2023, the Sugarcane Act of 1934 was included. It regulated the price of sugarcane to be paid by sugar mills to farmers in a particular region in the subcontinent. This region later became a country and made key amendments to the Sugarcane Act in 1972 to change rupee to their local currency. Which sub-continental country are we talking about?

1972 and 'subcontinent' both appear in the question, you should definitely have guessed Bangladesh.

The Indian government's removal of 76 outdated laws in 2023 included one from 1871 concerning a certain profession. These officers of the 'Crown' had the right to conduct inquests into suspicious deaths, order autopsy if required, and also arrest suspects. However, they were not permitted to enquire about any money left behind by the deceased. Which profession are we talking about?

This question has my vote for the single best funda in the week's set. The connection between the words Coroner and Crown feels like one we should be able to guess, but it's still a fairly difficult question I think.

A lovely gradient there.

3. It's Black, It's White!

Easily my favourite quad this week, and probably one for the ages, courtesy Dhruv Mookerji. Each question distinguishes between the black and the white variants of something, and you need to guess what. Beautiful concept, and a very approachable quad. Ask your family members these questions over breakfast.

• Martial art belts was definitely the easy one of the quad, I'm expecting a 100% get rate.

• Marble and Truffles were both nicely framed questions, but we placed them in that order of difficulty. My hunch is they'll play about even in difficulty, with Marble possibly playing a little harder.

• Black box and white box testing is an easy pick for the hardest in this quad since the term 'white box testing' is really not very well known at all. Most people just saw tech jargon and understandably guessed black hat vs white hat hacking.

Called it.

4. The Calydonian Boar Hunt

My first contribution this season is from an area I come back to over and over again thanks to an annual re-reading of Stephen Fry's books: Greek mythology. The Calydonian Boar Hunt is a lesser celebrated episode in modern references, but it had all the great cameos that you can expect from a particularly important 'node' story in myth.

• Castor and Pollux might play easy for an L4, even though we’re asking for two names. Big kudos to you if you didn't have a clue about Greek myth but still guessed Gemini because you were asked for twins. The sisters who feature prominently in the Trojan War are Helen and Clytemnestra.

• Jason is hard for an L1, although the Golden Fleece mention is about as straightforward as any mythology question can be.

• The Atalanta question initially had a football clue in it ("shares her name with a Serie A club"), but many of us now cringe at such overt cross-category hinting, so we avoided it this time.

• The Theseus question initially made mention of him defeating the Crommyonian Sow as part of his "3rd Labour", but we removed that when we realized the L-word would send pretty much everyone to Hercules.

  • For future reference though, Theseus and Hercules both performed Labours. Theseus did 6 of them and his stories usually involve him defeating his opponents with a combination of strength and cunning, as opposed to Hercules' more “Hulk smash”-like methods.

That went extremely well, gradient-wise. (PS: The email may have suggested otherwise, but that was an error, fixed now)

🎯 Thank you Aishwarya Subramanian for musketing the hell out of this quad and making me feel a lot better about making it.

5. Book Binding Styles

Niche but sexy quad topic. Dhruv Mookerji introduces us to four different book-binding methods.

• I was surprised by how many people seemed to be familiar with the Coptic denomination of Christians, to the point I started to suspect people of having googled this during the quiz.

• Spiral Binding drew actual cheers from the players, as is the wont for any question that builds on nostalgia. The term 'spiral binding' simply has that schooltime feel to it.

This bookbinding technique was prominent among the European clergy in the Middle Ages. Essentially, the leather binding of the book extends loosely below, so that the book could be swung upside down and tucked into the ______ (6) around one's waist, while they walked. Fill in the blank with the name for this kind of binding.

• Girdle was well clued, but the 6-letter count meant that 'buckle' was also a popular albeit incorrect guess.

High get rate for 3/4 questions, but Girdle was the single hardest question in the whole set. It was answered only 8 times in 65 games.

6. Shehnai in Bollywood Songs

Now there's a genuine India quad. Everyone assumes it's by Utkarsh (me included), but it's actually by Dhruv. Listen to the track and identify the Bollywood movie from the hints.

• Kai Po Che's Shubhaarambh made an auspicious first question of the season.

• Swades was probably frequently answered without playing the track at all, since 'motherland calling' does seem to indicate one iconic shehnai song more than any other.

• Bajirao Mastani was a tougher question, but the 'signature style of the filmmaker' mention might've helped some to narrow it down.

• Thappad is straight-up difficult, but rewards the real Bollywood fans, as all good L4s should.

I was wrong, Bajirao played harder than Thappad and was answered in less than half as many games.

7. Two-word Latin Phrases

The quad name made me think I would know all of these, but some of these were still new to me. Utkarsh Rastogi made some nice selections for his quad.

• Pari passu had to be retrieved from the recesses of the mind for some but was a much more familiar term to others.

• Jus Soli was new to pretty much all the groups I read for. Some might be more familiar with the right-of-blood version, known as jus sanguinis.

• Non Sequitur was initially mistakenly placed at L4 but was quickly corrected to L2.

• The mentions of magna and summa ensured that the hardest part of getting points for this one was simply not chuckling as you say "cum laude", a task that many groups failed at.

  • Inclusive Explanation for our non-Hindi speaking friends: The word laude or lauda or loda is Hindi slang for a male penis, so “cum laude” sounds like a hilarious invitation. For maximum impact while using it in a sentence, try to click your tongue a bit while pronouncing the 'da' at the end, making it land somewhere between a 'da' and a 'ra'. Go on, try it now. Attaboy.

A Quick Digression:

I once met a Catalonian woman while travelling in Vietnam whose name was spelt Laura, but her Spanish accent meant she pronounced it much closer to 'lauळa'. We were drinking together that day and as the evening grew more comfortable I eventually asked her if she knew what her name meant in Hindi. She laughed and said "Yeah, I taught in a school in Kathmandu for a year. The kids there never let me forget it!"

Nice gradient.

🎯 Nikhil Sonde and Zubaer M both scored a perfect 4/4, picking up their first muskets.

8. Leafy Greens

Another one of mine, arguably brought to you by my partner Smriti whose obsession with kale has persisted through the winter months here in Amsterdam and will likely see us through till April. The other three questions are just fillers, she would've made all four on kale if she was in charge.

• I thought Romaine Lettuce was well hinted with "brought to Europe via an Empire" (that wasn't me, it was an improvement by one of the editors), and I was surprised to hear at least one player refer to it as Cos lettuce, an alternate name that we included just cos Wikipedia told us to.

• Swiss Chard is a tough crack and you should applaud yourself if you got it from "was first described by Gaspard Bauhin", a name not easy to recognise as Swiss.

• Everyone knows it is punishable by law to make a leafy green quad that doesn't include Arugula.

🎯 Amit De and Kunal Doshi are eating right, and picking up a musket each in this quad.

9. Historical Figures in US Capitol Rotunda Paintings

We've classified this under art, but it's actually an epic history quad brought to you by Thejaswi Udupa.

• Lord Cornwallis was a worthy L4, you aren't getting that without being at least a tiny bit of a history buff.

• Pocahontas is gettable for 'civilized savage', although Sacagawea came up often as an alternate guess.

• Mississippi likely played harder than we intended, since the painting doesn't very obviously indicate that the 'discovery' mentioned in the question is the water body visible in the background.

• Columbus is a real head-slapper of a question, and kudos are due to Udupa. Almost everyone who missed that question was kicking themselves for it.

10. Twins Portraying the Same Character

New setter! Debasmita Bhowmik brings us 4 questions about 8 twins playing 4 characters across 4 TV shows. Phew.

• Modern Family is an easy L1, its simply too popular a show for a setter to mention 'Vietnamese daughter' and get away with it.

• The Boys was well clued with the 'naturally born superhero' hint.

• Orange is the New Black made the neat decision of casting male-presenting M Lamar for the role of pre-transition Sophia Burset in a flashback episode. The role is usually played by Laverne Cox, M Lamar's female-presenting twin sister.

• Who missed the Friends question man, that's a definite 100% get rate.

Some groups did miss Friends! The whole quad played quite level, which I wasn’t expecting but seems to make sense in hindsight.

11. Serialized Works of Fiction

Every week I'm allowing myself to skip one quad entirely from the writeup. This is that quad.

🎯 Musketeers Sayak Dasgupta, Shashwat Salgaocar, and Vinoo S all got a perfect score in this quad.

12. Museums dedicated to Fashion Icons

New setter! Shanine Salmon has a 'lifestyle' quad for us, making us guess designers mainly from their nationality but also some other clues.

• YSL was frequently cracked from the 'shortened form of his name' clue.

• I think Dior probably could've been placed higher in difficulty than Balenciaga. The latter benefits from there being relatively fewer big Spanish fashion names than there are Italian.

• Ferragamo toh there's a good chance I will have forgotten again by the time I reach the end of this sentence.

Hey, Dior did play harder than Balenciaga, but it also played just as hard as Ferragamo, but I really could not have predicted.

13. Unique CXO Roles

A creative quad by our own creative officer Rajat Gururaj. My first thought after seeing these questions was that this should've been a non-ascending quad, i.e. a quad with all 4 questions intended to have roughly even difficulty, since there's really not much to separate how we clued in UNDERWRITING and PROCUREMENT and CREATIVE and MEDICAL. Then I noticed this was quad #13, which means it WAS a non-ascending quad after all. Well done again editors!

So close to perfect, but Underwriting played harder than the others.

14. The 300 Club in Test Cricket

Simple, core cricket quad by Vikas Plakkot. Seemed tough to me when I was first attempting it, but after reading a few games it is obvious that these names are simply too well known to be anything other than a straight non-ascending quad.

🎯 Not one, not two, not three. SEVEN people scored muskets in the lone sports quad of the set. Take a bow Bedbyas Datta, Harish Swaminathan, Mandar Vaidya, Prathmesh Sawarbandhe, Sudarshan Aji, Suvajit Chakraborty, and Venky Srinivasan.

15. IEEE Circuit Symbols

What a delightful quad this was by Shanine Salmon! My favourite one this week. Did I say that already? Okay, then I have two. Very short questions, but every word chipping in to help make the question easier.

• Resistor might've played slightly easier than the others, simply for being the most recognizable circuit symbol for any school student.

• LED was tricky but the 3-letter clue helped.

• Fuse and Switch were straightforward, and I was surprised at there not being any alternate answers for fuse. A player in my game said circuit-breaker, which I had to mark wrong. I found out later that the two are fundamentally different devices, so all's well.

🎯 260+ people playing in this league, I feel sure a solid 150 must have engineering degrees. Francis Rodrigues and Varun Ramachandran were the only ones who made perfect use of theirs (?), scoring a musket each in this electronics quad.

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That’s all we covered in Week 1. I’d forgotten how fun this used to be! In the meantime, tell us what you thought in the feedback form here. We genuinely read all of it and act on it wherever possible. No, seriously.

Week 2 will be on soon! See you at a quiz maybe?