Game Week 2 Review: Podcasts, Pentathlon, Political Boardgames and Pearl
Also, vote to decide what to do with questions that "aren't working"!
Hope you all had a good game week. We certainly did, largely because of how much easier it was to find readers this week! Several players started stepping up to read games after their own game was done, but the biggest difference was made by the addition of a few new names to the team.
Nagendra Kumar Jamadagni, Priyank Dahake, Savita Raj, and Gauri Yadav have all joined the B612 reader pool, allowing for a much higher number of games to take place in the early days of the game week (when we need it the most). As I write this, Sander van der Heyden has also started picking up several games, making life much easier for us. Thanks, folks!
The scheduling of games has been a bit tricky, but hopefully, our last post may have helped a little. Game Week 3 has seen a lot more mail threads of people being nice to each other while coordinating timings, which is basically all we want.
Time to dive into the quiz review (I like that word more than 'analysis'). Headsup: We have made a LOT of boo-boos this week. You'll see.
Question Set: Game Week 2
Raw Data for the week: Game Week 2
Share your feedback for the set here: Feedback.
If you're unfamiliar with how reviews work, check this section of last week that covers the terms: Key for Newbies
Contents
Quads
1. Horror Podcasts
Puns always make for nice quiz questions. Or at least they make for well-liked quiz questions, hence lots of "OOHHH" moments after the answer reveal. But punny answers themselves can be quite tough to figure out, and Spirits turned out to be a little too challenging for an L2.
💬 While we're here, how do you feel about this league's aversion to using italics to make certain hints more obvious? We definitely enjoy adding the hints themselves but feel italics, even at their best, take away a bit of the fun of working out an answer. At worst, they just make question-setters lazy. Here's an example:
This weekly horror podcast has been around since 2006, and focuses on short stories. It is named after a temporary growth on a cell that allows it be mobile, almost like a fake little foot. Amoebas make use of it to move around (the growth, not the podcast). What is the name of the podcast?
Answer: Pseudopod
In the league games, 'fake little foot' was not italicized, so you had to notice it yourself and actively choose to do something with it. Would you have preferred that? It would definitely make the question easier, but maybe also a little too easy when you happen to know the answer.
2. Biagio vs Michelangelo
This was probably the riskiest quad we attempted this week. Every question was a bit messy in terms of what it was asking for. It's all very well to read a cool story about how exactly Michelangelo attacked a critic, but how do you make people guess the words "he drew a snake biting his penis"??
At a 19% answer rate, The Last Judgement was probably the single toughest L1 we've ever had in this league. And yet, it is still the easiest question in this quad, relatively speaking.
We edited the L2 at the last second to accept simply "snake" instead of "snake biting penis", which would've been an impossible guess.
Donkey Ears as a sign of stupidity wasn't too bad, but many went for dunce caps and other symbols instead. A "world of fauna" hint might've helped narrow this down a bit.
Minos was the sort of question that you'd only be able to ask in a quiz where you know everyone means business. Think Tier 1 FLQL Final or something.
💬 B612 doesn't do a separate Tier 1 final, we just use the same set for all tiers. This does result in our Tier 1 game being significantly easier than other leagues. Do you think we should change that?
🎯 Risky quad shmisky quad, Arnav Sastry got all four of these right, scoring his first musket of the season!
3. Political Board Games
A simple quad idea, and solidly executed IMO.
One of this week's 'moments' that I would look forward to when signing up to read a new game was when people would guess "Louis..." and then pause there knowing they'd have to provide a regnal number. If they ended with "...the Fourteenth?" I could then put on my best quiz master-y voice and say "You have selected the CORRECT LOUIS!"
Shasn was a fascinating one too, as it was one of those questions that people really shouldn't be using up a Bonus Attempt to guess on, but often did anyway. This was likely because of the "Hindi/Sanskrit word for governance" hint. If you look at that hint and think quickly, you'll think of, say, 'rajneeti', and get ready with your guess. If you look at it and take your time, use up all 30 seconds and stay calm, you'll conclude that there are just WAY too many Hindi words that could fit here, and a pass is probably the wiser course of action.
Lesson: Use all the time you have. Don't stop thinking just cos you think you have something.
4. Elements of Typography
It is confession time. We messed this quad up. Badly. Not by misjudging the difficulty of the question (we do that practically every week, that stuff is hard), but by pure human error.
Of course Lorem Ipsum and Serif are easier than Kerning and Swash. We wouldn't choose to put them on L3/4 and L1/L2 respectively, but that’s what happened anyway due to a simple copy-paste error, and it somehow got past 2 runs of proofreading 🙈
Dear readers. I was pretty tempted to hide this mistake from you (Thinking, "Other quiz leagues don't have to admit their mistakes in weekly reviews, what is this rubbish culture of transparency we've created") and maybe even show the ordering as we intended it to be: Lorem Ipsum > Serif > Kerning > Swash, which would've been a perfect difficulty gradient.
But what's done is done, and in the wise words of Vikas Plakkot:
❓While we've got you thinking about this, please help us out with a decision. What should a quiz league that runs non-sequential quizzes all through the week do when it realizes, say on Day 3, that a particular question or quad just "isn't working" the way we expected it to? Should we go ahead and make significant edits to the question set and ensure that the remaining quizzes in the game week have a better experience? Or would that make things unfair for the early players who had to deal with the goof-up?
Personally, I lean towards editing. Fairness be damned, this is a league of friendlies, and we shouldn't force others to have a less-than-perfect quiz just cos other people want to be higher up on an invisible leaderboard.
But an alternate view does exist, and several members of the B612 team felt changing a quad so significantly mid-week would be a step too far and fundamentally unfair to the people who already had to deal with the "bad question".
Where do you stand?
5. Statistical Charts
Did you pass on doughnut cos you didn't think it would be that easy? At 46%, it feels like a lot of people may have done that.
Gantt charts turned out to be significantly easier than expected too, which I blame on the preponderance of agile enthusiasts in our league.
As the last question of the question set, boxplots probably should've played easier than it did, but they look confusingly similar to candlestick charts, which considerably upped the difficulty.
🎯 The difficulty wasn't upped enough for Kevin Vegda though. They got 4/4 in this quad, and picked up their first musket this week!
6. Caves of the World
It made me happy that this quad finally got used. It was written months ago, and I've been ignoring it for a while (I'm too hopeless at geography to make good decisions about difficulty), but Game Week 2 had Vikas as primary editor and he was able to make it work. In its final state, this is quite an accessible quad, even for someone as geographically challenged as me.
Vietnam played harder than expected, possibly because of the use of the phrase "star-studded tourist trail", which made people guess the USA. Even if you didn't get it right though, Son Doong should probably be everyone's favourite TIL this week. It's a cave so massive that it has its own localized climate system. And rather astonishingly, it was only truly discovered and explored in 2008!
Bhimbeteka is the closer-home TIL for the week. One of our players, Nishant Mal, told me about how he Slumdogged this question: he had once played cards just a few paces away from the entrance to the caves, without really knowing about its importance. A 100,000-year-old prehistoric UNESCO World Heritage Site was just a stone's throw away, and he was chilling and playing poker with his friends!
Cenote somehow played harder than Glowworms, even though the latter was definitely more guessable. Cenote possibly gave an advantage to folks based in the US, and I read for at least 2 people who had visited the site described in the question.
7. Dr Rajkumar's Songs Picturised on Others
"This quad feels like an Udupa," said one participant, and he was right. The quad was written several months ago, in time for the final week of Season 3, and Udupa pointed out that I was clearly holding it back, even though he had tried to make the questions accessible for everyone.
He was right, I was treating it like I had treated the Caves quad, but I needn't have. Both Om and Ashwamedha contained enough clues to be fairly easy questions, and I got to say things like "Wow, I had no idea you were such a huge Dr Rajkumar fan!" to people with names like James Gratrex and Seoan Webb.
I've also now read enough about SP Balasubramaniam to consider the L3 accessible too, and the difficulty gradient for the quad ended up exactly how you'd want it to be.
An unexpectedly perfect quad and it also gives us our B612 Recommendation of the Week. Here’s a list of the songs that came up in these questions, that Udupa would like you to listen to. Enjoy!
Naliyutha from Hrudaya Haadithu
Hrudaya Samudra Kalaki from Ashwamedha
Megha Banthu Megha from Mannina Doni
Deepavali Deepavali from Muddina Maava
8. Interesting Words in Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
Probably my favourite quad this week, simply because it made people sing the song in their head while trying to answer the question. Or maybe that was just me.
Rajat Gururaj guessed Tangiers based on that dowry hint, but the answer key didn't mention a prompt to change it to Tangerine, causing him to miss out. Bad luck there, especially cos he ended up coming second in his quiz by 1 point.
9. Horse Accident Deaths
A fascinatingly specific quad gives us our third perfect difficulty gradient in a row. Not sure if we've ever managed that before.
Here's an extra for you, an alternate L4 that we replaced just cos the Qutb-ud-din question seemed to be a slightly better TIL.
His cause of death remains a mystery; while Marco Polo wrote that he died by an arrow wound, others say a captured princess stabbed or castrated him. Still others say he fell from his horse while hunting. A recent study, however, indicates the bubonic plague. Which Asian emperor?
Answer: Genghis Khan
🎯 Soubhadra Chakraborty probably would've cracked this one too, being our resident expert on accidental horse deaths, and also a musketeer this week!
10. Narnian Allusions
Ah yes, what better way to break a streak of nice difficulty gradients than with one that's an absolute mess?
I enjoyed the return of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (especially considering the quads were set by different people!), it adds a sense of continuity to the league that I quite like.
The White Witch question was placed at L1 because we figured that saying 'female antagonist', 'three titular subjects', and the publication year were enough to get to Chronicles of Narnia, but it did play harder than Jesus Christ, which has rightly been called an L0 in the post-week quad discussion on our Whatsapp group.
Meanwhile, Fimbulwinter and The Pit and the Pendulum both played like independent L4s.
11. LGBT Symbols
Technically a 'good' difficulty gradient, but still quite abrupt in its jump from L2 to L3 difficulty.
White Knot played much harder than expected, and I'm still not entirely sure why, but my guess is that it was a combination of the being multi-part (separate clues for colour and phrase), and no additional hint to help confirm a guess. In hindsight, we would've made the 'knot' part of the question much easier and just relied on people not being able to guess the colour for it to be an L3.
PSA from Aparna Kallakuri: The question should've said 'wedding' rather than 'marriage', since the phrase 'tying the knot' refers only to the wedding ceremony and not to the entire institution of marriage. Thanks, Aparna!
Much respect to our Saviour of the Week, Notts, who was the only person in the league who had seen a Lavender Rhino before and thus saved us from having any unanswered questions this week. Second close week in a row!
Care for an extra?
A simple black ring worn on the middle finger of one's right hand is a means of indicating sexual preferences for which community of people? The ace playing card is also sometimes used to represent this community, due to the phonetic shortening of the name.
Answer: The Asexual community (who usually prefer the term ‘Aces’)
12. Ancient Greek Pentathlon
Back to smooth difficulty gradients, and I particularly liked this quad for being accessible without any of the questions being over 45 words in length (mine are often 70+, which can be hard to process in 30 seconds).
In fact, the L3 is my new go-to example for the perfect tiny quiz question:
The javelin throw was also part of the ancient Greek pentathlon. The event consisted of two parts, ekebolon and stochastikon. If the ekebolon was won based on distance, what did the stochastikon measure?
Answer: Accuracy! It’s a javelin event, so they were throwing at targets, much like modern archery events.
There's almost zero prior knowledge needed to answer the question correctly, and yet most people in haste will go for guesses like height, strength, speed, etc. If you got accuracy, good job staying calm and just thinking!
13. Pearl Homages
I got some poor feedback for this non-ascending quad, as people didn't think that Pearl was a movie "worthy of a whole quad". But hey, I thought we addressed that with that Prakash quad last season. Quads don't need to be important themselves, only the answers do.
We still ended up asking for Pearl itself as an answer, and that one rightfully dropped to a 7% answer rate. Oof.
14. Sushi Varieties
We keep unconsciously making this league easier for boardgamers don't we? There's a whole quad for political board games already, and then we do this quad where a regular player of Sushi Go would have a field day.
Sashimi was often guessed for prior questions before it actually showed up as an answer, making it a little easier than it should've been IMO.
One of my favourite moments was a quiz in which someone started the sushi quad with "I'll pass, I don't know nothing about sushi" but then finally got their own direct right, explaining "I'm vegetarian, and California Roll is one of the sushi types that is often available in veg!"
🎯 Aditi Chatterji picked up all four of these, scoring a perfect Sushi musketeer!
15. "Seven" Books
Topical does not mean easy but come now, some of you had to have seen this coming. Vivek Tejuja even tried to tell you all weeks ago on the Whatsapp group, but did you listen? Did you?
This quad was relatively easy to identify, and in hindsight, we could've also made the fourth question harder given that you knew to expect a Seven in the title by then.
🎯 Anand Sivashankar and Shankha Ghosh Dastidar see someone win a book, and instantly memorize their name, knowing it's going to come up in a quiz soon. Both score 4/4 in this quad, picking up a musket each!
Seat Averages
That Lorem Ipsum mess-up really had an impact, look what happened to Seat 4.
X’s, or direct questions missed by all 4 seats.
Seat 1: 4.10
Seat 2: 3.73
Seat 3: 4.65
Seat 4: 6.35
Owns, or direct questions answered by each seat.
Seat 1: 5.70
Seat 2: 5.55
Seat 3: 5.98
Seat 4: 4.6
That’s all we can squeeze into one email. Game Week 3 is already on. Get to scheduling please, I hear it’s something a bit different.