Game Week 5 Review: Music Themed Mimir!
Did you notice?
That's right, it's Sunday night and that makes this post like 5 whole days late. But not even that can curb my excitement for this particular review.
Game Week 5 of the league saw the use of a very special question set. Specifically, it saw the release of what has become a bit of a tradition for many quiz leagues1. Something that attracts equal parts praise and criticism every time it is attempted: a Themed Set.
I'm New Here, What's a Themed Set?
The phrase 'Mimir quiz' just means that a quiz is made for 4 players2 and has questions that come in sets of 4, i.e. quads3. A full Mimir is usually 15 quads or 60 questions.
A Themed Mimir set is one where every single one of 15 quads and 60 questions connects to a central theme. Not only that, the theme needs to connect WITHOUT messing up the usual weekly balance of topics. Every B612 set has a quad each on Arts, Culture, Music, Social Sciences, Movies, Geography, History, Food, Lifestyle, Literature, Science, and Sports. So in order to make a real themed set, all of these categories need to be covered, while still connecting to the main theme of the set.
Creating a themed set is thus a huge challenge for setters, and it can take many weeks to plan the quads and distribute them correctly, without losing sight of the novelty of the set. Curiously, if everything is done correctly then a themed set is barely notable at all to players. Many players get through the week without even realizing that there is a theme at play! I call that a win, since it means the set met the constraints that we had fixed, but continued to play as a perfectly enjoyable general quiz.
B612 has done themed sets before. We did an F&B themed set in November 2022 (a bit of a misstep, since it clearly favours players who have an interest in food) and a Dark Night-themed set in March 2023 (a particularly creative idea, especially with the quizzes played in 'dark mode' for extra feels). But I suspect we've surpassed those two with what came out last week.
Game Week 5 was a Music-themed set, and I think it's easily the best of the three we’ve done. Weeks ago when the theme was first being settled, Vikas Plakkot gave the other setters a very clear directive: "Make quads where the questions are related to music, but the answers are not." I thought this was a wonderfully succinct way of summarising what we're trying to do, and the result is the following 15 quads.
Enjoy, and let us know what you think!
Stats
Game Week 5 was the hardest set we've had this season, with 3 games seeing less than 20 points scored by all players combined.
1. Baje Sargam Har Taraf Se
While 13 of the 15 quads this week were written using Vikas's directive of "no music connection in the answer", we still had two quads where the category being fulfilled really was just music. These had to be special quads, and we'll be covering them first and last in this post.
The first was the Doordarshan special Baje Sargam Har Taraf Se, a TV show that features classical Indian musicians celebrating the cultural diversity of the country.
The quad played expectedly hard, but the difficulty gradient was perfectly smooth. I was convinced that a topic like this would generate muskets but it didn't happen. Maybe classical music is more popular than I thought.
2. Birdsongs
You could call this the obvious intersection of music and nature.
Roadrunner played easy because you can't put 'meep meep' in the question and expect it to be challenging.
Hoopoe was a bit challenging for an L2, and probably should've been swapped with the terrifying Shoebill, especially because of the latter's 'common household item' clue.
Barred Owl was the single hardest of the week, being answered only by Balakrishna Subramaniam, Subrat M, and Manoj Saranathan.
3. Revolution Songs
For the History quad, we used songs associated with revolutions.
I was surprised by La Marsellaise being answered as frequently as it did, possibly cos I would've missed it myself.
Singing Revolution was the only question in the set that didn't connect to the music theme in the question text. Consequently, it was the only question where remembering the theme would help you figure out the answer, and it was great to watch some folks go "Well, based on the last 24 questions, is this Singing Revolution?"
4. The Banquet Scene in Nixon in China
A wonderfully specific topic, this quad pulled 4 questions out of a single scene of the opera Nixon in China. The quad was written to fill in the F&B category, but ended up being used as a mixed quad since the answers weren't really food connects at all.
Chopsticks and Smoking were pretty much perfect as short-form workable questions, but Spring was a little too "high fundoo" as one player described it. That means the question is still technically workable, but the answer is too 'out there' to realistically be guessed in a Mimir quiz.
During the banquet scene in John Adams's opera Nixon in China, Pat Nixon (Richard Nixon's wife) sings "Take a deep breath and you can taste it". She is not referring to any item on the table but the arrival of what, indicating a thaw in the relations between USA and China?
Answer: Spring!
5. Album Covers Inspired by Painters
One of the more obvious themed quads, the intersection of Arts and Music can easily be found in famous album covers.
The L1, L2 and L3 are all recurring artworks in B612 quizzes, to the point that Garden of Earthly Delights actually plays as an L1/2 no matter what you do with the framing of the question.
I was convinced Gustave Dore would be one of the hardest questions of the week, but my fellow setters assured me that it would be answered a lot, and they were right. It was a relatively easier L4.
🎯 Santonab grabbed a perfect 4/4 score in this quad, picking up a musket!
6. A Song Of.... Books
This connection is nice and literal, but the difficulty gradient broke when the L1 question about the nursery rhyme Song of Sixpence played hardest of all.
Song of Solomon might've played harder if it appeared earlier in the quiz, but by the time this question showed up folks knew the first few words of the answer.
🎯 Harish Swaminathan may or may not have benefitted from the question order, but scored a perfect musket in this quad all the same.
7. Movie Bands
🎯 Abhilash knows his movies, or perhaps he knows his bands. He grabbed all four of these in his game!
8. The Menu @ Coachella 2024
We struggled for a long time to come up with a real Food quad that was still themed around music. In desperation, we turned to our AI overlords who came up with this.
Asking questions about the food menu of a music festival that's at least 9 months away may seem like a stretch, but I think the questions turned out okay.
The sushi question was an easy one disguised with mentions of 'hand rolls', since all you had to do was notice the name of the restaurant: Kazunori.
Biangbiang noodle is an enjoyable funda but it’s obscure enough to act as an effective L4 question by itself. Instead, Paloma played even harder, only being answered by 7 cocktail aficionados in the whole week.
9. AR Rahman Song Locations
The Geography quad was never going to be too much of a challenge to make, since locations of music videos had a lot to be mined. Restricting the videos to AR Rahman songs made the quad feel tighter and more focused, and the difficulty gradient was absolutely perfect.
10. The American Revolution as seen in Hamilton
I have claimed to be working on a complete Hamilton-themed Mimir quiz many many times and most people hearing me no longer take me seriously. To dispel their doubts and buy myself some time, I finally got around to making 4 questions (only 56 more to go!). These would've been even more enjoyable with clips from the musical numbers from the show, but we had a ton of media already in the quiz and didn't want games to run too long. I struggled to not sing these questions.
Rochambeau is a nice pick for L4, but the question did contain the clue that the name of the Frenchman sounds like "Rush on boys!" At least one player attempted to answer this by putting on their best farcical nasal French accent and saying "ro sho bo!" and actually got it right!
11. Iron Maiden Literary Inspirations
It's hard to believe that nobody's done this quad before in another league (feels like Led Zep Lord of the Rings references have shown up at least twice). The difficulty gradient was smooth, but only barely, given how much harder it was to remember the name of the Edgar Allen Poe story (although many were able to name the author!)
🎯 Vinid and Zubaer had all four of these, scoring some belated muskets this season.
12. Hairstyles associated with Musical Movements
A perfect difficulty gradient, although it's hard to believe that Curtains could've played that hard, given the framing.
Jheri Curl is another excellent L4 selection since the term itself is familiar, but it's still difficult to know when to use it.
13. Athletes with Musical Surnames
This quad breaks the "answers shouldn't connect to music" directive, possibly justified because the same words are also the names of the sportspeople in question.
We foresaw that Song would be a tough one to guess, given that there's no really explicit way of clueing it, even with a letter count, given how many musical terms seem to have 4 letters.
Rondo was easily the more obscure answer in terms of the musical connect, but the player was the most popular of the four, balancing out this non-ascending quad quite perfectly.
🎯 Manu Bhardwaj snagged a musket in a particularly hard-to-musket quad, given how workable Song and Key were!
14. Wedding Music
I'll be honest with you, we weren't huge fans of this quad. It's a little too basic in terms of the topic being covered ("all weddings, hence culture quad"), even though the excellent framing for each question more than made up for the meh subject matter.
I particularly enjoyed the use of challenging clues like asking for the largest ethnic group in the world to get players to Han, and name-dropping 'kina gecesi' to make people guess Turkey.
15. Concert Crowd Sing-Alongs
Finally, the other music quad is simply (wait for it) a crowd-pleaser. We saved up the longest video clips for these 4 questions and it was completely worth it. The sound of 65000 people singing Bohemian Rhapsody brings up feels that no other question is likely to match.
The 2 contemporary choices in the quad played much harder than the others, even though many were able to recognize Calm Down by Rema but simply unable to remember the name.
That’s all from this season’s Themed Week. Please tell us if you liked it!
For a non-league example of a themed set, check out Siddhanth Rao's Seinfeld quiz. It's one of my favourite sets, because while every question is clearly the creation of a Seinfeld superfan, the answers are always things that are notable outright of the Seinfeld universe. This means you can attempt the set even if you haven't watched a single episode, and you'll probably do fine!
Exceptions exist, some of Dhruv's quizzes have been explicitly written for 2 or 3 teams.
Exceptions exist, several sets have been written to be quad-less.