New Trivia Game
New Features and what is retained and what is changed.
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Most all of the previous features, formats, and rules will remain unchanged.
The only change in the existing rules will be that ALL questions will be worth
one point.
Why? Because I said so.
OK, here’s a few reasons:
1) In my experience with the game, more often than not, I found that the 2 point question was easier or at least no more difficult than some of the 1 point questions.
2) I figure that the difficulty of the question is only in the mind of the beholder, so we can’t really know the true difficulty of the question till after the answers come in.
3) If I make a what I consider a ‘difficult’ question worth more than another question, I would be, in effect, giving a greater advantage to those ‘more savvy’ players. Why should that be?
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Other existing features retained:
2 Divisions
I had thought about eliminating divisions, I wondered about the reason for these. So before making a decision, I asked Hoosier about divisions. Here is an edited response to my question:
“Mike Kendra suggested the two-division idea either at or soon after the time I started serving as moderator. The idea was to give more players the feeling that they would have a chance of being declared the winner of a game.
Mike felt that, since we have some players who answer all or nearly all the questions correctly in every game, this might be a deterrent to new players joining, since they might look at the scores for past games and realize that, if they were to miss as few as one or two questions over the course of six weeks, they would have virtually no chance of winning.
Thus, the First Division, consisting of players who had achieved perfect scores in two or more past games, and the Second Division, consisting of everybody else, were born.
You or any other new moderator would be under no obligation to continue the two-division setup, although I think [some players] might be a bit disappointed if it were discontinued, since they are very close to earning promotion to First Division status."
For that reason in itself was almost good enough for me to decide to retain divisions.
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New Features:
1) Players may suggest their own questions.
You all will be able to submit to me your suggested question via the question thread or Private Message. I will try to use one player submitted question each week. The submitter of a question used will be cited with their question. The submitter gets automatic credit for the question.
This may be an opportunity for some of the more competitive of our players to try to outfox his/her fellow players.
However, keep in mind that I will decide which player’s questions will be used, and if I decide a submitted question is either too difficult or too easy, I probably would not use it. I may, on the other hand modify (edit) such a question in these cases to make it more or less difficult, and then use it. I expect some folks might submit such interesting questions, that I would be negligent not to use them.
I must add that I hope you all will not deluge me with all the questions you may have dreamed up over the years. Try to submit the ones you find most interesting.
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2) Prizes!
Well now that I have gone out that limb about prizes, I’ll need to explain about this.
I had first thought of prizes because another CW trivia game I participate in does offer a monthly prize. Not something I’d want for myself, but if I ever won it, I could instruct that it be donated to some school, etc.
So as I assumed responsibility for our game, I began to think about what I could do if there were prizes.
I decided that I could not myself or put it on Ami and Mike to great expenses.
So here is what I came up with:
A prize for each ‘winner’ of the 6 week game, to the high scorer, no matter which division. I will also figure out some rules so that no one may win more than one prize until all consistently participating players have won a prize. I want to spread these around. I’ll try to clarify the ‘prize rules’ sometime after we get going with the game.
These ’prizes’ will not be “fabulous prizes”, no Cadillacs or washer/driers. These will be ‘token prizes’ nothing very special, but a token of appreciation and of achievement in the game.
Some one suggested a “bragging rights certificate for the winner”, but I can’t do certificates, and I’d like to do a bit more.
I realized that I had prizes available to me in some odd Civil War related books and DVDs which, for whatever goofy reasons, I had acquired duplicates of. So those will be the first prizes.
These will not be junky, each will be at least VG to excellent condition, some lightly read, some unread, etc. Maybe doesn’t sound very promising, but I don’t think you will be disappointed.
I'll PM a list of available prizes to the winner at the end of each game.
As mentioned above, I did not want to burden Ami and Mike with this prizes idea, I just took it on myself, so I’ll supply the prizes and pay the postage to send to the winners.
TIES: I got some wacky ideas about how to settle ties, but nothing decided yet. We can work it out if and when that happens.
I’ll post a more comprehensive explanation of the Prize rules, etc. once we get the game underway.
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New game questions, and tips on finding the answers:
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The new questions.
From some of my ‘sample questions’, you may have noticed that they might not be quite as straightforward as the questions we have been used to when Hoosier ran the game. This is partly because past questions were generally derived from CW Trivia books and other ‘CW Trivia” sources.
My questions will not come from these ‘trivia oriented’ sources, so you can throw away all your Webb Garrison books.
Most of my questions will come from things I variously come across here and there, which I find odd or interesting and that are perhaps not common knowledge and that I think you all might enjoy learning about. To add variety I have instituted the ‘submit your own questions’ feature.
You might not like my questions for a variety of possible reasons - they are too hard, they are too easy, they are too trivial (but how can a ‘trivia’ question be ‘too trivial’?), or are not enough or too much about the battles, or not enough or too much about the political, economic, or social issues of the time, and you can let me know what you think. I know I won’t be able to please everyone. I will try to make it, as well as I can, challenging, fun, and somewhat educational.
Sometimes my questions will be in the form of several clues, from which you will need to connect in order to ultimately lead to the answer (like my sample questions, if you go back to those posts you will find I have explained the way those clues could be connected to find the answer). So they are sort of like little puzzles to solve.
*** Another thing I may do with some questions is to include in the clues, something I'll refer to as 'curveballs'. A
curveball is a clue which is entirely valid, but which is somewhat deceptive in that it may suggest something other than what it really means. Curveballs will not be highlighted in the questions.
(Example: If I use "White House", is that the one in Washington D.C. or the one in Richmond, Virginia, or White House Landing, also in Virginia? You can be reasonably certain that I would not be referring the Presidential Palace of the Kyrgyz Republic! ... or can you?)
Also all of my questions may be ’solved’, by using various web searches. I think you all have Internet access (If you don’t, send me an email and we’ll see if we can work that out.).
I’m not relying on books because while you all, presumably, have web access and can Google or use some other search engine, I figure you all don’t own the same books.
And this leads me to…….
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Tips on finding the answers:
Many of you already know several sources of CW/WBTS information, so I’ll just suggest a few, and if you like you can submit suggestions as to additional helpful on-line sources.
If the questions are about people, some might be:
http://famousamericans.net/ http://politicalgraveyard.com/ http://www.findagrave.com/
If you think the answer might be a General:
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/generals.html (better than most CW Generals sites as it notes battles and wounds, dates of promotions, place and date of birth and death, and often pre and post war occupations)
http://home.ptd.net/~nikki/csagenls.htm (Confederate)
http://home.ptd.net/~nikki/usagenls.htm (Union)
Battles:
Civil War Landscapes Association (cwla) - Home Frame Chronological list of Civil War Battles http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/pottery/1080/ (good for Order(s) of Battle(s))
To find an Order of battle on Wikipedia:
battlename "confederate order of battle"
(eg:
Gettysburg Confederate order of battle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
battle name “union order of battle”
(eg:
Vicksburg Union order of battle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Here’s a method I have found very useful, but some of you may not be aware of:
This is the
Amazon “Search Inside” feature, and here is how to work it;
Go to the ‘books’ category at Amazon.com, enter the word or phrase you wish to search on, and click on the ‘Go’ button. You will likely get a long list of books, some of which have a picture of the book with a big red curvy arrow and the words “SEARCH INSIDE” on top of the picture of the book. (If it says “LOOK INSIDE”, that’s not gonna work.), Then you can either click on the book and when the page for that book comes up, click again on the picture of that book. You’ll get another page with a search function on the left. Enter what ever other clue you might be interested in and see if the book contains anything about that clue. (An alternate way to get to this page is to: from the long list of books page, look under the book title, etc for the word “excerpt”, next to this should be a page number. Click on that page number, or if you see “See a random page”, you can click on that, and you will get to the ‘Inside Search’ page.)
An example: The question has something to do with some guy who was killed while leading a cavalry charge ordered by Judson Kilpatrick at Gettysburg.
Go to Amazon, books section, enter “Gettysburg”, click “Go”. The first book on the list I get is Stephen Sears’
Gettysburg. OK, I click on “page 75” where it says “Excerpt”. Now I’m ‘inside’ the book. I enter “kilpatrick”, “charge”, and “killed” (without the quotes) and 2 pages are listed where the words ‘Kilpatrick’ and ‘charge’ and ‘killed’ appear. This is promising!
Read each of the pages for names. You will find the names “Merritt’ and “Elon Farnsworth” in the context of an Kilpatrick order to attack or ‘charge’. Now to finish your quest go back to Google and enter “merritt” and “Gettysburg” together or an advanced search with “elon Farnsworth” as an ‘exact phrase’ along with “Gettysburg”, see which one was killed. There’s your answer.
I used to do this with the book
Civil War High Commands, an excellent, but expensive source book for high officers, but I think they turned off access after I searched it once too many. But it is a great way to search something like
Generals in Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders, and other books. Unfortunately,
Generals in Blue: Lives of the Union Commanders does not have the “Search Inside” feature.
Google Books Search. What it does is sort of what Amazon’s “Search Inside” thing does only much easier and less restrictive. If you have a question, let’s say about Grant’s floating headquarters, go to Google, enter “books” and click ‘Google Search’. Then click on “Google Books Search”, and enter your search words. In this case try “grant” “vicksburg” “headquarters” “ship” (or boat or steamer or ….) vary your clues, and you might find what you need. Sometimes books have more, or better, information than the web, and Google Books is a good research tool. Also, you can access both Generals in Gray and Generals in Blue, and Civil War High Commands, which you can’t access at Amazon.
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Sam
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