A new season, a new series of delayed review posts. Let’s see how long this streak lasts.
The opening week of the league always features random draws, which means you might’ve been up against someone far better or far newer at this than you are. Don’t worry though, it gets better. Every week the draws will get more and more competitive until every game becomes a nail-biter (we hope).
Readers
Readers are the engine that runs this league, and somewhat surprisingly, we are not facing a shortage this season (yet 🤞). This is largely because of folks like Savita Raj, Fiza, Anisha Karnail, Gauri Yadav, Harsh Shah and of course, Nagendra "The Machine" Jamadagni, who have read 44 games between them in only about 1.5 weeks! Even more impressive, #3 on the list of top readers currently is a man who isn’t a part of the dedicated reading team but is in fact a league player himself. Kiran Kalyan has read 8 games as I type this, and he’s already donated all of his reading credits to cover the league registration fees of student players. The man is my hero.
Recorded Game and Retro
Here’s how Week 1 went. Our recorded game this week features Shivani Ghotikar, Srishti Agarwal, Dev Raj and Aswath Venkataraman. Shivani’s a new player, so the video includes a quick explanation of the rules and format as well.
We also managed to do a Game Week Retro this time!
(Retros happen every Monday at 10pm IST. Join us for the next one!)
Don’t worry if you missed it though, here’s a summary of everything we covered this week.
For each quad, we'll be sharing a list of answers and the following numbers:
Total: Number of people who attempted the question, i.e. did not pass.
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 actually 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 see any difficulty gradient with L4<L3<L2<L1 and call it a good gradient.
1. Mirrors in Art
Our season-opening quad and question covered a pretty interesting funda, which I think the question didn’t do enough to explain, so let me cover it again here.
In the painting above, since we can see the subject’s face in an angled mirror, that should mean that she in turn can see us and not her own face. Our tendency to ignore that simple fact and just assume that the subject is instead admiring herself is called the Venus Effect.
The difficulty gradient was good for this quad, albeit harder than usual (unsurprising for an arts quad).
A Bar At The Folies-Bergere is probably my favourite painting ever, but that’s only because of an analysis I read once that may not be widely accepted anymore. In a nutshell, Manet intentionally skews the reflection in the mirror behind the bartender in order to show us (the observer) our own face, which struck me as incredibly clever. That’s what I read anyway, but the Wikipedia page seems to cover a completely different interpretation, so I’ll just send you down that rabbit hole and wish you luck.
Not To Be Reproduced was the hardest one of this quad, with most people guessing single-word answers because of the way the question was framed using a single blank:
Commissioned by the poet Edgar James to be a self-portrait, the use of a mirror in this Magritte painting is as ironic as its title. Which 1937 painting is this, where the mirror reflects the back of the man's head, while the Edgar Allan Poe book in the corner is reflected normally, as in a mirror? While mirrors don't typically [BLANK] the same image, the one in this painting actually does, making the title rather ironic! Answer: Not To Be Reproduced
🎯 Chris Abrams scored the very first musket of the season by getting 4/4 correct in this quad, and it isn’t even the last time you’ll see his name in this post!
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2. Revenge Dresses
Couldn’t have asked for a better preview image for this review post.
A funny idea for a lifestyle quad, although I will admit that some statements were a bit reaching.
The term “revenge dress” is one chosen by the media and not by the women in each of these questions, so it felt a bit odd reading out sentences like “here she is cocking a snook at her ex-husband Liam Hemsworth” when in fact all she was doing was making her music video. In hindsight, I’d have preferred if we added qualifiers like “the press claimed that…” in every question. Sometimes it’s just a dress, you know?
Miley Cyrus was placed at L1 just cos we figured people would recognise her, and they did.
The first version of the Bella Hadid question was accepting just surname as enough for points, but this was changed during playtesting. With that change, we added the last sentence too. A sentence like that gives away a lot (“oh if they’re asking for full name that must mean it’s those two sisters”), but it wasn’t enough and the question still played harder than the others in the quad. Quite a lot of people just picked the wrong sister.
Which supermodel wore this revenge dress to the 2017 Met Gala, when her relationship with singer The Weeknd was on the rocks with him having cheated on her with Selena Gomez? You'll need to give us her full name.
Goblin Mode was placed at L4 simply because it seemed more obscure than the other famous names in the quad, but that was way off. Turns out a lot of people had come across the term, even though it was pointed out to us during our Retro that this is a fake funda and Julia Fox never used the term at all.
3. Most Successful Sporting Franchises
This one surprised us because we figured the NYYC’s 132-year-winning streak at the America’s Cup was extremely well-known, but the paltry 10 correct answers in the week suggest that the question might have been framed poorly.
4. Shifted Venues for Sailing at the Summer Olympics
What a great quad idea, no? It’s got cool trivia and accessible geography all rolled into one. Take a bow Vikas Plakkot.
Savannah did well for an L1, cos of a well-placed “woody grassland” clue.
I think we made a mistake with Le Havre falling prey to something that I’ve seen affect other quiz leagues too: Escalation. That funda of Impression, Sunrise giving its name to the Impressionism movement is a bit of an old chestnut now, so naturally, the next step is to assume it’s now “easy for everyone” and step up to asking a question that relies on you remembering the secondary bits of info around it. This is a mistake since the vast majority of players haven’t been quizzing quite as much as the most vocal minority (and the setters). So La Havre should’ve been an L3.
Meanwhile, Kingston had a few too many clues for an L3, but Tallinn is probably just right for an L4.
5. Misinformation in US Military Textbooks
The most horrifying quad of the week was also one of the most interesting.
We had a long discussion about the ordering in this quad, specifically how we were going to place Iran and Trail of Tears. The former seemed like a bit of a crapshoot while the latter had blanks and context to help you figure out the phrase. We eventually decided that Iran was guessable from “Whom does the USA hate in that part of the world?” but the data shows us we were wrong, and Trail of Tears played slightly easier.
The Gulf of Tonkin did well as an L4 and as a TIL for those who missed it. The incident that resulted in the US commencing open warfare in Vietnam was almost a complete fabrication, and the truth was hidden for literal decades. My favourite quote from the Wikipedia page: LyndonJohnson commented privately: "For all I know, our navy was shooting at whales out there."
🎯 This quad also allowed Chris Abrams to score his second musket of the same week!
6. Jugaad In Other Cultures
Anthony Bourdain was the logical guess for ‘food person who writes’. The book mentioned in the question, Nasty Bits, is not his most famous work, but it does include the short story A Chef’s Christmas which is in my opinion the best available sample of Bourdain’s style of writing. Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw are great books, but A Chef’s Christmas is the perfect bite-sized introduction to that same rough-but-musical prose. There’s even a 60-minute audiobook, and it’s read by Bourdain himself!
Frugal Innovation saw plenty of people crack ‘innovation’ but not so many figure out ‘frugal’.
Article 15 was a bit sly and maybe even a bit underhanded, but hey if it wasn’t for Frugal Innovation it would’ve played as the perfect L4.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has a concept related to Jugaad. The French term for this - 'débrouillez-vous' - translates to 'Figure it out yourself' or 'deal with it yourself'. This concept is named after a fictional provision of the 14-article constitution of the secessionist state of South Kasai which was semi-independent from 1960-62. What two-word name, where the second word is a number? Answer: Article 15 (emphasis added later and not present in original question)
🎯 Amol Joshi scored his first musket in this quad, hacking together a perfect 4/4 score!
7. IMDb Top Rated TV Episodes
The most widely answered quad of the week was, unsurprisingly, the Entertainment category.
Felina and Ozymandius were pretty much interchangeable. We packed a lot more clues into the former (“iron, lithium and sodium” = “FeLiNa”) but I don’t think they made much difference. People just know Breaking Bad.
Rains of Castamere is pure trivia, but then that’s what L4s often need to be, and even if that it was answered as much as the L2s of several other quads.
🎯 Santosh JS added to his ever-growing collection of B612 muskets by scoring 4/4 in this quad, as did Rishabh!
8. Mohs' Scale of Hardness
Quartz played a little easier than expected, showing us we could’ve left out (or just obfuscated) the “used in wristwatches” hint to achieve a better L2.
Corundum played well for its difficulty and several people tripped up by saying carborundum instead, allowing readers to put on their best QI-Klaxon imitation as they revealed that the answer text specifically warned against accepting it.
9. Lesser Known South Indian Languages
This quad played alright but did see a bit of an ordering problem. Not difficulty ordering, but the order in which they appeared in the quiz itself.
Sankethi was easily the hardest question in the quiz, eliciting an audible ‘oof’ in most of the games I read when I revealed the answer. Because it appeared first, people were tempted to take a stab at it, and Tulu was a common incorrect guess. This meant Tulu was very much at the top of everyone’s mind when it made its own appearance in the quad.
Anup Kumar was this week’s Saviour, avoiding that most damning of accusations, An Unanswered Question, by correctly answering Sankethi.
Dakhani saw a couple of people give up entirely because they “only know it as Hyderabadi”
In one of my favourite Moments this week, Arpita Shetty mumbled “I hope I get the Tulu one, that’s my mother tongue” during the first Sankethi question, then correctly answered Tulu when it did come in the second question, and finally wrapped up the set by declaring “oh yeah this is the other part of my heritage” and correctly answering Kodava Takk on the third question. Slumdogged her way through a whole quad.
10. ALL-Gae you can eat
Kelp played harder than Agar-Agar, which was unexpected.
Kombucha was my favourite question of the week, with everyone who missed it letting out an audible groan - a sure indicator of a good question.
What is the name given in Japan to edible kelp used to make _____-cha ('tea') by infusing it in hot water? What is known as _____-cha in the Western world is a misapplied loanword, made by fermentation of sugared tea using a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, causing poisoning if done incorrectly, and which has some popularity in India due to brands like Toyo, Bhu and Borecha.
Answer: Kombu
🎯 Maitrey scored his first-ever musket in a category that probably surprised even him, with a perfect score on edible algae!
11. Superbowl Half-Time Show Themes
There’s always that one quad that accidentally gets two L4s and this was ours for the week.
Italicized hints (thoo) were enough to see Indiana Jones and Aerosmith through.
The Indiana Jones Super Bowl show is widely considered one of the worst ever. You should not watch it. Here is the link.
Swing was tough, in spite of the appearance of a favourite word of every quizzer, ‘alliterative’, probably because nobody expected an act named Big Bad Voodoo Daddy to be a swing band. Most people went for samba and ska.
Choose Or Lose was a straight-up mental block. The (6,2,4) letter hint got people to ‘choose’, but then they made it ‘choose to’ and nothing made sense after that. “Choose to Vote” fits the letter count but doesn’t rhyme, and “Choose to Lose” is not the best campaign slogan.
🎯 Srijit Kumar picked up a musket in this quad, answering every one of these correctly!
12. Amitav Ghosh Title Descriptions
I have a soft spot for this toughest and lowest-scoring quad of the week. It’s actually quite a nice idea, i.e. to use the phrase “According to [the author]” and follow it with an in-universe description of the title of the book. The formula can actually be used to make a lot of pretty decent Lit questions. I fully expect to see it come up in one of Vivek Tejuja’s Lit Friendlies.
Sea of Poppies and Calcutta Chromosome were the “easy” ones, with the former playing harder because it was the quad opener, when people still didn’t know what to expect.
Great Derangement and Nutmeg’s Curse screwed over pretty much everyone except the most die-hard Amitav Ghosh fans.
Mixed, Non-Ascending, Experimental Quads
13. Strategies to Stop Vampires
Another cool idea for a quad, and one that has Nidheesh Samant written all over it. Something interesting happened in every one of these questions.
Tuberculosis allowed us to slip in a “consuming the populace” hint under the radar, and I’m glad we didn’t italicize it since it made for a more rewarding experience for those who did answer it.
Fishing Nets was a fun question made better by all the wrong answers it got. The question boils down to “thing in coastal villages with a lot of holes” and the most popular wrong guesses were corals and sponges.
Yes, something called Sticky Rice Mortar really was used in the construction of the Great Wall of China.
Daystar exposed one of the hazards of supplying letter counts as hints.
In Blade: Trinity (2004), after slaying countless vampires, Blade finally takes on the big daddy – Dracula himself. This version of Dracula, called Drake, is the first vampire and is immune to sunlight. What virus is specifically created by Blade and his allies to kill Drake? The virus (7 or 3,4) shares its name with an alternative name for Venus and Lucifer, as well as the name of a Christian television network. Answer: Daystar
The question mentioned “(7 or 3,4)”, which means the answer is either one 7-letter word or two words of 3- and 4-letters each. But in a pinch, that same hint can also be read as “A 7- or 3-letter word, followed by a 4-letter word”. Since the question also mentions Lucifer, “morning star” (7,4) then seems like a great guess, even if it doesn’t fit the other clues, and causes a lost BA for just about everyone.
14. Valentine's Day for SpongeBob
Topical quad of the week. Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!
Acorn wasn’t all that easy to guess, since the question really only said “pick a nut”. People who did get it right claimed to have based it on the fact that Sandy is a squirrel, and that acorns are kinda-sorta shaped like hearts. You could also just have watched Spongebob, which is the B612-approved way to answer this question.
Romeo and Juliet played WAY harder than we expected, probably because the question failed to repeat the fact that the Spongebob episode was themed around Valentine’s Day. I think if we had emphasized that point a little more then the answer rate would jump up to 40% or something since most people did guess Shakespeare's works.
15. Women Co-Founders of Tech Giants
Ever since she joined the Setters team this season, Aparna Kallakuri has been churning out quad after quad with the word “woman” in it. We aren’t complaining because we have close to 50 years of shoddy representation to compensate for. You should probably get used to seeing a quad like this every other week.
Cisco didn’t really require the question text at all, the logo was enough to remind everyone of their TCS IT Wiz days when such questions were staple diet.
🎯 J Krishnamurthi isn’t complaining either, scoring a perfect 4/4 in this quad for his first musket of the season!
Seat Averages
X’s, or direct questions missed by all 4 seats. Seat 1: 5.20 Seat 2: 5.69 Seat 3: 4.65 Seat 4: 5.66
Owns, or direct questions answered by each seat. Seat 1: 5.70 Seat 2: 6.22 Seat 3: 6.35 Seat 4: 5.18
That’s all we’ve got for the Week 1 review. Hope you’re busy scheduling/playing Week 2, and see you at the Retro on Monday!
