Game Week 6 Review: Dinner Knives, Debuts in F1, and Demands for Statehood
Also, a little info about how draws are made.
Question Set for the Week: Game Week 6
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The League stage of the season is finally over, and your results in the past 6 weeks have decided your opponents in the next two. B612 has never been the most competitive of quiz leagues, but the end of the season still brings in the odd VERY ANGRY bits of feedback. Here’s a submission we received on our feedback form from an anonymous player.
Because the submission is anonymous, there’s no scope to reach out and help this angry person. But it would be amiss of me to not use this opportunity to tell you folks a little about how league grouping works.
How are draws decided?
Draws are random but within buckets. For example, if 32 players are playing in a game week, then we might divide them into 2 buckets: players ranked 1-16, and players ranked 17-32. Players in each of these buckets are shuffled and games are drawn randomly.
This is why a quiz league needs to maintain an internal leaderboard, even if it isn’t publishing one publicly. Keeping track of your rank is how we ensure competitive games, and we can only create buckets if we have an ordered, ranked leaderboard.
Is the bucket size always 16?
No, of course not, I don’t know where our anonymous friend got that idea. Bucket sizes vary all through the season. Early in the season, you want completely random draws, so the bucket size is massive, like 80 or maybe even 120. With every passing week, as more quizzes are played and the leaderboard more accurately reflects players’ abilities, we can decrease the bucket size to 64, then to 32, then to 161. It’s not always a clean process, since players drop out all the time, and the total isn’t always a multiple of 4, and all sorts of other irritating reasons.
Towards the end of the season, the bucket size is 16 and then finally 8, which is when we play our semis.
Why have you all of a sudden decided on ‘tiers of 8’?
We…haven’t. We’ve been doing 6 weeks of league games followed by 2 weeks of knockouts for like 7 seasons now. Two players from each semifinal qualify for the tier finals. All of this implies that the knockout weeks use buckets of 8. Nothing sudden about it.
Is there anything else you’d like to know about how we do things at B612? Ask us here and we’ll get back (or I’ll get fodder for the next review post).
Okay now let’s review Game Week 6.
Quick Stats for the Week
Game Score Distribution
The last week of the league stage saw another unusually tough set, reminiscent of Week 4. Far fewer groups crossed the 50-point mark, and one group even scored under 20! Sorry about that 🙈
Seat Averages
No muskets. None. Zero. Damn.
Update: Sorry about that. There were muskets, and a fair number of them. The majority were in Seat 4, possibly because that’s the seat that got the Vettel question.
1. Devious Tactics of Apple Computers
Setter: Soumya Sharma
Everyone enjoys a quad that shits on Apple. The quad had a nice, smooth gradient, although Vehicle Identification Number and Planned Obsolescence played dangerously close.
One of our players suggested that ‘enshittification’ be accepted instead of Planned Obsolescence but the two appear to be very different concepts. Read the wikipedia page anyway, it’s a fun read.
Pentalobe was the hardest question of the week, with only 8 answers.
2. Usha Uthup Covers of English Songs
Setter: Vikas Plakkot
What an excellent find. Usha Uthup covering Western music makes a fun quad for pretty much everyone. You can listen to the entire album here.
A popular wrong guess for the Billy Joel track was “Every Sha La La La”, the more popular name for Yesterday Once More by the Carpenters, and I have to say they do sound very similar.
🎯 Unbeknownst even to himself, Armand Sanchez is secretly a massive Usha Uthup fan, scoring a perfect 4/4 in this quad!
3. Materials used in Ancient Sculptures
Setter: Dhruv Mookerji
Wax was a gimme after the question hinted at Madame Tussaud’s.
Gold and Ivory was a two-parter, but still felt every L1 types, because what else could ‘chryselephantine’ really mean?
We’re all very surprised that Alabaster played so much easier than Stucco, but I guess it’s all in the framing. The ‘Egyptian cat goddess’ clue won out over the more vague clues about finishing coats on residential buildings.
4. Dream Mid-Season F1 Debuts
Setter: Harman Singh
We tried our hand at making a more ‘hardcore’ F1 quad, warranted by the obvious new popularity of the sport.
Vettel had to be the L1, but nothing else was a given in the ordering. We ended up deciding that Bearman was topical enough to be at L2, and De Vries might play harder than Glock since Glock has more cultural importance (“Is that Glock? Is that Glock slowing down?”) but De Vries’s entire F1 career only lasted a few months.
We were right about the Bearman decision, but wrong about De Vries, who is recent enough for our player base of relatively new F1 fans.
🎯 Prajwal V, Shubhankar Gokhale, and Vignesh Ramani have been waiting all their lives for a real F1 quad, and they finally got one. Perfect muskets for each of them!
5. Demand for Statehood in India
Setter: Vikas Plakkot
Every week I'm allowing myself to skip one quad entirely from the writeup. This is that quad.
🎯 Akshay Gurumoorthi, Ajitesh Singh Rana and Maitrey Deshpande demanded and received a musket in this quad!
6. Ministries in India's 1st Cabinet
Setter: Dhruv Mookerji
We definitely overcomplicated that States question.
The Ministry of Home Affairs was known as the Ministry of Home Affairs and [BLANK] in Nehru’s first cabinet. The blank referred to the new administrative divisions that had not been fully sorted at the time of independence. Sardar Patel was the minister in charge, and his efforts helped settle the issue, and contributed to his moniker of the Iron Man of India. Fill in the blank.
The question clearly points to ‘Princely States’, and many players were able to get there, but when compelled to pick a one-word answer to fit the blank, they often chose incorrectly.
Minister Without Portfolio is a good choice for an L4, being a familiar term to many, but hard to pull out in 30 seconds of Mimir.
7. Polish Nationalism
Setter: Dhruv Mookerji
Bonaparte needed a few more clues to narrow things down.
Rubinstein was among the hardest questions of the set, so here’s an 8 minute video to help you remember him for next time.
8. (Dinner) Knives Out!
Setter: Dhruv Mookerji
Another nice choice for a quad, although it’s unfortunate that we need to restrict ourselves to just four questions.
Water was a rare example of a truly universal quiz question, meaning there’s really nothing one needs to know in advance in order to be able to work out the answer from the question.
Oyster fork played harder than Butter knife, which we probably should’ve seen coming.
Charger plate played hard. We could’ve easily clued one of the alternate answers, Under plate, but then it wouldn’t have been an L4 would it?
9. Punny Lit Titles
Setter: Debasmita Bhowmik
B612 has history with pun quads. The most memorable were probably Cocktails from Tequila Mockingbird (Season 3) and punny book titles (Season 2), the latter of which had Moby Duck in it too! Surely five seasons is enough to repeat one funda.
Puns ALWAYS make for hard questions. But, unlike most hard questions, people always feel like they should be able to crack puns, cos they seem so "gettable". 30 seconds of Mimir isn’t enough for most people to crack these, so kudos to you if you got any of them.
10. Feline Names of Economic Groups
Setter: Rajat Gururaj
Tiger Cubs had no business being placed at L2, higher than Asian Tigers.
In comparison, Pacific Pumas isn’t a bad choice for L4, but perhaps a tad overclued. Say ‘alliterative’ in any question and the get rate jumps by about 20%.
11. Skincare Products
Settter: Vikas Plakkot
Toner played harder than Exfoliants. The latter carried clues (“Latin for ‘strip off leaves’”) and even examples (pumice stones, chemical peels), while the former was a straight trivia question and not as easy as we’d hoped for.
Humectants may have been answered more than other tough questions of the set, but still had the lowest Correct% of the quiz, a solid contender for hardest question of the week.
🎯 Meghana Iyengar had no trouble with any of these, scoring 4/4 and picking up her first musket of the season.
12. Audie Awards 2024
Setter: Thejaswi Udupa
I mean how many Irish bands do you really know?
Michele Obama was a well-phrased question that included a bunch of factual hints, but only one lateral mention of “her well-known husband”.
Here’s another indication of the age of our audience. Rosamund Pike’s role in Wheel of Time is better known than Patrick Stewart’s long run in the Star Trek franchise!
🎯 I was hoping someone would get a musket in the audiobook quad, and Dhruv Sharma made it so!
13. A Gem of an Anniversary
Settter: Vikas Plakkot
A particularly nice gradient for what was intended to be a non-ascending L1 quad. The multiple clue format made this a popular quad.
Ruby was the only question in the quad that wasn’t correctly answered in every game of the week.
14. Kissing Traditions
Settter: Vikas Plakkot
Kissing the Blarney Stone played much harder than the others, but this was by design since Seat 2 needed a harder question.
🎯 Movin Miranda scored a perfect musket in this quad!
15. Demonym Colours
Setter: Debasmita Bhowmik
Irish Green was easier by design.
Both the India and China questions were framed in a way to invite guesses, which is easy to do when the answer is a country. India was the ‘gotcha’ of the week for many of our players.
The brownish-yellow colour shown here is derived from the resin of namesake trees that grow in parts of South East Asia. A popular shade in East Asian watercolour, it gets its name from the older Latin name of which country where the tree is majorly grown? The robes of Buddhist monks used to be dyed with this shade as well.
This one is a straight Southeast Asian country crapshoot, and I read multiple games where players guessed pretty much every country in that region other than Cambodia.
That’s all for Game Week 6. Time for knock-outs (but nobody will get knocked out).
The bucket size needs to be a multiple of 4 but there’s really no requirement for it to be a power of 2. It often is anyway because sometimes I feel the need to connect with my ancient, unused computer science degree.