Game Week 5 Review: Soft Drinks, Suffixes, and South Indian Hill Stations
Also, what is overcluing? When is it bad?
Key for Newbies: Explanation of the terminology and data that appears in this post.
Question Set for the Week: Game Week 5
All feedback is welcome here: Link.
Featured Quiz
You can follow along with this quiz, featuring Sangeeth Varma, Pranjal Agrawal, Aishwarya Subramanian and Shruthi Chandrasekaran, and read by my newest favourite reader, Gayatri Verma.
Quick Stats for the Week
Seat Averages
An easier set means muskets become more rare, since at least one question of each quad can easily be stolen by one of the other 3 people in your group.
Game Score Distribution
Well, we succeeded in the goal of bringing difficulty back down after a rough Game Week 4. Games scoring 30-40 significantly dropped in favour of games scoring 51-60.
1. Outdated British Taxes
Setter: Dhruv Mookerji
A messy quad to start with, but it illustrates an interesting problem that setters face. This was intended to be an ‘easy’ quad, with all questions being within reach for the majority of our players. But there is an anchoring effect at play when it comes to guessing.
When the first question of this quad appeared, showing an image of a building with several bricked-in windows, several players would’ve rejected Window Tax as being “too simple” a guess. The question needs to say things like “which simple English word describes the tax that…” and only then will players be willing to venture a bonus attempt on a guess.
Brick Tax had a similar problem where the question said “rich people had stone houses, so only poor people were affected” and then even mentioned an accident that damaged multiple homes. You can’t blame people for guessing Wood Tax.
2. Rigor of Angels by William Egginton
Setter: Thejaswi Udupa
This is a fairly classic example of a Deep Quad into a single book.
Heisenberg was probably misplaced at L2, it was always going to play slightly easier than Arundhati Roy.
Kant and Borges are well levelled and classic lit.
3. Revival of Great Indian Soft Drinks
Setter: Vikas Plakkot
Rooh Afza is a mainstay in questions about drinks in the subcontinent, and the high Correct % means we should probably stop asking about it.
Keventers had several clues baked in, with ‘iconic glass bottles’ and ‘the original milkshake’ alongside all the factual stuff. But we’ll talk about overcluing later in this post.
🎯 Anand Shivashankar and Kushan Patel both scored a musket in this quad!
4. Women's Trouser Styles
Setter: Dhruv Mookerji
If you read a game this week, you might’ve derived the same joy I did from quizzes where the long-time quizzers stared blankly and tried to come up with a decent portmanteau, while pretty much every woman playing was amused at being awarded a point for jeggings.
These jeans start above the navel, and taper towards the bottom. They were in fashion in the 80s and 90s, favoured by older women, which gave rise to the short name [BLANK] jeans. The term was made famous in a SNL skit by Tina Fey on May 11th, 2003, on the eve of a certain occasion. Which jeans?
Mom jeans could’ve been the L1, the question says ‘short name’ and the tagline in the image is fairly on the nose.
There have been rumblings of ‘overcluing’ for this and a few other questions, meaning an easy question is getting missed by some players because there are too many clues, some of which take time to unpack and can be distracting. In this case, it’s the inclusion of Tina Fey and the actual date, neither of which is directly related to the answer but can easily send you off in the wrong direction. I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment, at least for this question, but several other setters do, which means you can expect us to be much more rigorous with our editing in the coming weeks.
Paper Bag pants was a worthy L4.
🎯 Aastha Sharma scored the only musket in this quad, a perfect 4/4 score!
5. TV Shows with Titular Female Leads
Setter: Vikas Plakkot
This may look like a regular quad to you, but it’s quite an achievement in my eyes. One of the hardest jobs in the Mimir-verse is levelling a quad on TV shows. Most people now pick their shows from the feed of their preferred streaming service, which is designed to be hyper-personalized. So unless a show becomes popular culturally, i.e. outside the context of TV shows (think Game of Thrones), it’s nearly impossible to guess what people have or have not seen.
The gradient here is a good one, but only by the barest of margins, which again emphasises how hard this is.
I enjoyed the phrasing of the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt question, which said that she “isn’t one to back down”.
The Veronica Mars question mentioned that the show was set in the town of Neptune, which may not have been an intentional clue to push your subconscious mind to think of planets, but we’re going to pretend like it was.
🎯 Abhinand KR scored 4/4 and picked up a musket in this quad!
6. God Bless Africa!
Setter: Soumya Sharma
This quad would’ve been a pure African country crapshoot for me, but you folks did much better. Hope all the readers had fun learning how to pronounce Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika no less than four times per quiz.
Die Stem may be vaguely recognizable as Dutch, but the phrase “painful history of the country until 1994” is definitely enough to guess South Africa.
Tanzania and Zimbabwe were both a bit tougher, but “united with an archipelago” is pointing to Zanzibar for the former, and the mention of Zambezi is plenty for the latter.
Zambia is far beyond my geographically challenged quiz abilities, but I liked the density of the clues packed into the question, particularly this phrase: “…exhorting people to "Stand and Sing of [BLANK], Proud and Free", flying high like the noble African eagle, just like it does on the nation's official flag.” A flag clue in text form! Excellent.
7. Mustelids
Setter: Dhruv Mookerji
See, contrast this with the TV show quad and you’ll notice a different challenge in levelling.
Naturally, the movies-and-comic-books question Wolverine will be at L1, and of course Pole Cat will be the L4.
But how would you place Mink and Weasel? Both are very similar questions. If you recognise the animal, great, but if not, the clues are what decide difficulty.
Because this mustelid is also semi-aquatic, it could be mistaken to be the otter, but its dark fur is consistent, and isn’t white at the belly. It has traditionally been prized and hunted for its fur, but animal rights activism in recent decades have helped make it a species of least concern by the IUCN. Identify the creature.
The name ‘mustelid’ comes from the Latin ‘mustela’, meaning little mouse. Mustelid as a term refers to this creature, Mustela nivalis, the smallest member of the mustelids. It is slightly larger and longer-tailed than a ferret. Which creature, whose common name is also used in English, typically in a negative context?
For Mink it was the mention of fur (but not fur coats!), and for Weasel it was the usage in an English phrase. We decided that the latter was a more complex clue to crack, but as you can see in the stats below, we were wrong. What would you have done?
8. South Indian Hill Stations
Setter: Vikas Plakkot
God bless the player who sent us feedback last week about not including enough South Indian content and compelling Vikas to put this quad together in mere minutes.
Played like a non-ascending quad though, and a relatively harder one at that.
9. Flowers Painted by Women
Setter: Dhruv Mookerji
If you’re shown a picture of a bulb-like flower, and told that a Dutch artist painted it in the 17th century to capitalize on the ‘craze’ around her, you really should be guessing it’s a Tulip.
These Mary Cassatt paintings are depictions of the various stages of bloom of which flower, more famously associated with another painter’s artwork series? The species is called *Victoria amazonica*, as well as *Victoria regia*, which is the alternative title of the paintings.
Water Lily was a good example of old funda being asked in a new way.
Dandelion was the other question of the set that got called out as a case of ‘overcluing’, and in this case, I can agree. Look at the question:
Which flower that grows in Japan, associated with temperate climates in Europe and North America, is depicted in this 1985 Yayoi Kusama painting? The specific species is most likely *Taraxacum japonicum*, but we need the common English name. The leaves might be helpful in identifying it, since their shape lies behind the name of the plant.
There is a LOT of unhelpful info here: a country, a year, 2 continents and a scientific name that feels like it’s trying to tell you something. The only genuinely helpful bit was right at the end, pointing to the shape of the leaves. The answer note says that the name ‘dandelion’ means ‘lion’s teeth’, and really that’s the kind of content you need in a question.
Ignore the Quad Code column, Jimson’s Weed was obviously the L4, we’re not that bad at this. Gradient was good only.
10. New Age Hybrid Sports
Setter: Vikas Plakkot
A messy gradient follows.
Pickleball was naturally the easiest, and it probably benefitted from us mentioning Padel in the question, eliminating the potential guess.
Teqball surprised us by being easier than the fairly popular Spikeball. It’s also a very guess-y question, inviting people to take a shot at it even if they didn’t know much.
Spikeball was the final question this set that received the ‘overcluing’ criticism, and again, I agree. Take a look:
This new-age hybrid sport, originally known as Roundnet, has seen a revival under a trademarked brand created by the founder. Combining elements of volleyball with trampoline, the players essentially [BLANK] the ball on to the mini trampoline, giving the sport its name - _____ball. Fill in the blank (5) with the name of the sport, a common sight at beaches and parks today.
The volleyball hint is there, but it’s hidden amidst a LOT of fluff. If we’d simply said “This sport derives its name from an offensive play in volleyball”, we’d probably have seen way more answers.
11. Instruments in Hawaiian Music
Setter: Thejaswi Udupa
Ukulele was made particularly easy to guess since many players had guessed it for the Hawaiian Guitar anyway.
Frying Pan played alright for an L2, but there were a LOT of alternate guesses based on the shape of the guitar. My favourites include Spoon guitar and Ladle Guitar.
Half-White was easily the hardest question this week, with only 4 correct answers. Well done, Ajit N, Eric Mukherjee, Subrat M, and Vignesh Hariharan!
12. Places Named After Dates
Setter: Utkarsh Rastogi
Favourite quad this week purely in terms of the “oh that’s cool” quotient.
Cinco de Mayo should’ve been on L1, bad miss.
Birla House was the family home of industrialist GD Birla that was located on Albuquerque Road in New Delhi. However, what was the road renamed to, to commemorate an unfortunate incident concerning one of the residents of Birla House in early 1948? Before you answer, try and figure out which quad this question belongs to. It'll help.
30th January Road was an excellent question, but there’s just so much to unpack in 30 seconds that I applauded every time I saw someone get this right. It goes “unfortunate incident 1948” → Gandhi assassination → DATE QUAD → 30th January. That’s a long journey, and one that requires you to keep track of quads, which not all players like doing anyway.
Coup d’etat was a slightly broken question, since it was trying to get you to guess something specific but not too specific. The question says “A general answer is all we're looking for” but that’s just clumsy framing IMO.
6th of October City, great L4. Be proud if you cracked that one.
13. Songs That Became Movie Titles
Setter: Vikas Plakkot
Every week I'm allowing myself to skip one quad entirely from the writeup. This is that quad.
14. "Little" Suffixes
Setter: Soumya Sharma
A clever idea for a non-ascending quad, that evoked plenty of groans from the players when they lost track of what a ‘suffix’ is.
A surprising number of people thought of ‘pipette’, then saw ‘suffix’, and guessed ‘Pip’ instead of ‘-Ette’. The 30-second Mimir clock does things.
-Cule posed some interesting prompt challenges. Many players got to ‘molecule’, but should you prompt them if they guess ‘-ule’ instead of ‘-cule’? If you do, you’re essentially just instructing them to add another letter, which makes the prompt pointless. If you don’t… well it’s a suffix AND it’s a partial answer. How can you not?
-Chan is the one that broke the gradient. The Nohara family is simply not that familiar a name, even for Shin-chan fans.
15. Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories
Setter: Rajat Gururaj
I consider the L1 here (Air) a bit of a pointless question, since there’s almost no scope at all of people getting it wrong, and yet it did happen! 4 people either passed or got it wrong.
No, we didn’t actually think Wernher von Braun would play as easy as Air, but Seat 2 was playing easy in our playtests and we had to do something about it.
Stars is another clever question, or maybe I have a soft spot for any question that shows you an image and asks you what’s NOT in it. It’s the same reason I liked the Churchill’s Pipe question from a few weeks ago.
That’s all. See you in a quiz!
The "accident that damaged multiple homes" was for the Chimney Tax question (correctly) and not the Brick Tax question as pointed out in this review.