Game Week 4 Review: Surgery, Sultanate, Slam Dunks, and Scenic Trains

Also: some notes on set difficulty, and the unenviable job of the Reader.

• Key for Newbies

• Question Set for the Week: Game Week 4

• All feedback is welcome here: Link.

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Late post this week, which means I’ve definitely seen the data already. These aren’t predictions, these are reactions.

Featured Quiz

You can follow along with this quiz, featuring Siddarth Raman, Yuthish Prabakar, Shreya Vishwanath and Ashwin Gopalakrishnan.

Quick Stats for the Week

I have something to confess. We knew Week 4 would be tougher than anything before it. I’m not saying it was intentional, cos that word seems to imply that we were rubbing our hands together in glee at the thought of you all scoring 4s. That did not happen. But there was a sentiment among the setters to make a certain type of quad.

Recently we had some discussions about how the ‘accessibility’ of questions can sometimes be overrated, since that isn’t an objective measure anyway and will inevitably reward players randomly. The pursuit of accessibility can occasionally just push a setter towards making unnecessarily laloo¹ questions. To fight this instinct, I think we all tried making some quads this week that rewarded simpler quizzing virtues like memory and recall. Straight sports, simple band names, etc. Remember, these quizzes are near-contemporaneous creations, and most of the questions were written less than 2 weeks before you attempted them. This means the tone of a question set is very much a reflection of how the setters were feeling that week, and this week we felt like this.

The fully expected side effect of all this was a harder set, but theek hai, that’s what Game Week 4 is for.

Seat Averages

• Some imbalance between Seat 1 and Seat 4, in both Owns as well as Xs.

• Far, far fewer muskets this time around, but evenly spread.

Game Score Distribution

A general downward slide compared to previous weeks. Fewer groups scoring over 50, and many more scoring under 40.

A Hard Job For Readers

Many answers this week required readers to exercise some judgement when deciding whether to prompt, or even accept an answer. This could be because of loose framing of questions, but it’s not always avoidable even in the best of times. Your quizzes do depend hugely on how your Reader handles situations.

We do receive complaints once in a while about how certain guesses were evaluated. I want to stress that as setters we don't care as much about being technically correct with answer evaluation as we care about the four players having a good experience in the quiz. One way a reader can ensure that this happens is to conclude every awkwardly handled question (eg. bad prompt, double answer, accidental answer reveal) by just checking that all 4 players are okay with the decisions taken. If the players don't speak up, the reader needs to gauge this themself. Conversely, if a player does think a question should be handled differently, the best time to say something is immediately after the question. If you say something during the quiz, before the next question, it can be very deftly handled by the reader. Hit undo, ask other players on honour system whether they "would have gotten it right if it had passed", redo, etc. Once the next question shows up on screens, things are MUCH harder to change post facto. The BAs and the passing order complications mean that we can't change scores after the quiz, which is good cos we weren't there and we don't know what happened.

As a further reading recommendation, here’s an article Utkarsh Rastogi likes, on the role of the umpire in cricket.

“I think the reader is like an umpire in quizzes. Players must accept that the reader is human and will make mistakes. As long as the mistakes don't become biases favouring a specific player, that should be welcomed 😊”

1. Art and Surgery

Setter: Vikas Plakkot

• I think starting a quiz with a proper noun arts question is a pretty hard line. And putting Tulp on L1 was not our greatest decision.

• The L3 was one of the cleverest questions I've read in a while, although I can be convinced that 30 seconds of Mimir wasn't the best format for it. Reproduced in full below.

The Gross Clinic and Agnew Clinic (both shown above) are two of the most popular paintings by Thomas Eakin that depict the titular surgeons doing a thigh surgery and a mastectomy respectively. Eakins smartly makes one significant change in his depiction of the two events, fourteen years apart, to reflect a change in practice in the medical field deriving from how the presence of anaesthesia made it more bloodless. What change did he make in his depictions?

Answer: BLACK vs WHITE Coats
(Black was used earlier as a mark of respect for the dead)

Oof, that’s a bad start. This is the most unbalanced quad we’ve done in a while.

2. McDonald's Variants

Setter: Vikas Plakkot

• McAloo Tikki was naturally going to be the easiest, and seeing it over and over again in quizzes has made me miss it here in Amsterdam. I've never even liked McAloo Tikkis, but definitely having one when I visit India in April.

• Raclette was equally obviously going to be the hardest. This Swiss melted cheese dish is fairly popular in Europe, but that's it.

• We had a long debate over which would play easier between Poutine and Bulgogi (I guessed Bulgogi). I'm glad we settled on Poutine since it wasn't close at all. Great job, editors.

Nice to see a good gradient again.

🎯 I wonder how many of these Puneeth Nagaraj has tried? If not all, it certainly isn't holding him back. He scored 4/4 in this quad and grabbed his first musket of the season.

3. Band Ads in The Recycler

Setter: Thejaswi Udupa

• The Guns and Roses question literally mentioned Slash, hope you didn't second-guess yourself out of that point.

• Metallica and Mötley Crüe played very evenly, which kind of makes sense.

• Don't worry, I've never heard of The Bangles either.

I did a pub quiz at Bar Regular & Jack 2 weeks ago², where I asked this question:

The naming of which American heavy metal band was influenced by the Löwenbräu beer than they were drinking at the time?

Answer: Mötley Crüe
Popular Incorrect Guess: Motörhead
Not a Popular Guess But Could've Been: Blue Öyster Cult

🎯 Musketeer Arnold D’Souza had all of these, scoring a perfect 4/4 in this quad.

4. Lexicon of Fragrances

Setter: Thejaswi Udupa

As tough as they come, with an accidental case of two L4s.

• We were prompting on just 'Cologne' but in hindsight we could've accepted it too, since it's used synonymously with Eau de Cologne.

• For the Gourmand question, how did your reader handle the answer 'gourmet'? I saw readers reasoning that this was a similar-sounding French word that also relates to food, and there was a chance that the two were etymologically related, so many took the cautionary approach and just prompted. As it happens the two are not variations of each other, so a prompt is unmerited (we added a note to the answer key later), but the reasoning is still sound. Can't expect your reader to speak French.

• Amber and Sillage were both answered less than 5 times in 65 games.

5. NBA Slam Dunk Contest

Setter: Harman Singh

This picture is my apology for not including Vince Carter in a Slam Dunk quad.

• It is a bit silly to have questions on both Jordan AND Kobe in a basketball quad. This is exactly what I meant when I said the need to make a quad accessible (even to non-basketball fans) causes setters to make stupid decisions. I reasoned that the Jordan question was framed funkily enough that many would miss it, and true enough some folks did, but it wasn't enough.

• I have no explanation at all for why our L4 played easier than our L3, that was a huge shock. I suppose this means the general body of NBA fans in this league has stopped following the sport more recently, cos why else would you miss Aaron Gordan but get Nate Robinson?

🎯 Ajay Krishna picked up a quick musket in this topic, as did Gautam Dambekodi, who just last week sent us feedback asking for a proper sports quad!

6. Plant Family Names in Taxonomy

Setter: Dhruv Mookerji

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

7. Capitals of the Delhi Sultanate

Setter: Dhruv Mookerji

A perfectly levelled history quad. Agra was a gimme for everyone. Lahore was difficult but possible to identify from the image. Daulatabad is where we're really testing your recall, and if you know Badayun then you're just winning in life.

8. Religious Symbolism

Setter: Vikas Plakkot

• Star and Crescent probably could've been framed a little better to earn the L1 badge. As it was asked, people often said only Crescent Moon, and the complications of prompting would lose them a point.

• 62% of you know the name of Thor's hammer. Heh, losers.

• The Baphomet question initially said the deity was worshipped by Freemasons, and we were approached by a longtime league player who told us that we should probably add the word 'allegedly' somewhere, since the whole thing was a hoax from the 1970s. "I'm a freemason, and it's not used anywhere in our rituals". We sheepishly corrected the phrasing.

9. Scenic Express Trains

Setter: Dhruv Mookerji

• I mostly ignore letter count clues that go over a certain number, which is silly since it's not hard to count out 13 letters in my head. This is probably why a lot of people missed Reunification, even after first guessing Unification.

• The Glacier Express has surprisingly been making an appearance for some players in targeted ads on Instagram.

• Flip the Jacobite question to arrive at one that's much easier for newbies. "Here's a picture of a train in Scotland. What nickname does it have, owing to its appearance in a movie series?" Answer: Hogwarts Express.

10. Burnt Alive At The Stake

Setter: Shanine Salmon

The Hammurabi question had several clues to get you there, but they dried up in the questions for Wicker Man (perhaps better known now for being a particularly terrible Nicholas Cage movie) and Strasbourg (which I am surprised 39 people got right).

🎯 Sree Kanthamneni demonstrated some range here, scoring an unlikely musket or a perfect 4/4 score in the quad. Weird thing to know about, Sree, just saying.

11. US National Parks, or Something Else Entirely?

Setter: Vikas Plakkot

Vikas showing off his setting chops here with a quad that harks back to some Dhruv Mookerji classics. 2 ways of arriving at the same answer.

• Zion and Joshua Tree were rather perfect questions.

• Badlands and Pinnacles were L3 and L4 respectively (ignore the screenshot below), which makes this a ‘good’ gradient, but not ideal. Pinnacles in particular felt like such a good question because the answer was a common English word, that I wish we’d added several more clues and gotten the Correct % up to about 10%.

12. Children's Games in India

Setter: Utkarsh Rastogi

• Honestly, we're asking for trouble with questions about the regional names of games that likely have hundreds of names in use across the country. We had enough variants of Seven Stones, but I'm sure there are other names to Akkad Bakkad that we just didn't know. Ikir mikir was added only after a few runs when enough Bengali people had been scandalized.

• Mancala was offered for Pallanguzhi, but that term apparently refers to the whole family of stones-in-holes games.

Btw we've received some feedback telling us that we're not doing a great job with South India representation (Pallanguzhi was clearly a ‘token’ question here), which setters Thejaswi Udupa and Vikas Plakkot have naturally taken to heart. Expect something done about this in the coming weeks.

13. Small Characters in Fiction

Setter: Vikas Plakkot

The non-ascending quads this week were being leveraged as extra levers for seat balancing, so don't panic at these numbers.

An interesting side effect of the ordering of these questions in the quiz was that many answers were given away before the right question for them turned up. Liliputians and Smurfs were popular guesses for the Munchkins question (the map was blue!), and they remained popular guesses for the rest of the quad.

14. Bob's Burgers and Rom-com Posters

Setter: Debasmita Bhowmik

Romcoms get a raw deal in most quizzes, but the few fans we have in the league really enjoyed this rare spotlight on their favourite genre. All the movies were fairly recent too, which is just Debasmita stressing that she's one of the few setters on the happier side of 30.

🎯 Naren Banad dreams of straight movie quads like this one, and nabbed what must've been an easy musket. Puneeth Nagaraj grabbed his second of the week!

15. Baby Shark Doo Doo Du Du Du

Setter: Rajat Gururaj

I'm kind of enjoying this streak of us planting an earworm every game week.

For your viewing pleasure, here is the original German track Kleiner Hai as performed by Alemuel. The Baby Shark dance is there, although the jingle is missing, and you can clearly hear the Jaws sample in the beginning.

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That’s all we’ve got. See you in a quiz!

1. The internet translates this Hindi word to naive or childlike, but I meant it more in the sense of lazy and unambitious.

2. I’m probably doing another on 27th March. If you’re in Amsterdam or the vicinity, you should come.