Trivial? In one sense of the word yes, I suppose, in that it contained trivia, but it was in no way a small game. It was HUGE!
The game of Trivial Pursuit involved making your way around a circular board, collecting six different coloured wedges. You earned these wedges by answering questions. Each wedge was a different colour and the colours were associated with one of the 6 different trivia topics – Geography (blue), Entertainment (pink), History (yellow), Arts & Literature (brown), Science & Nature (green), and Sports & Leisure (orange).
The spaces were each randomly coloured, and whenever you landed on a space you had to answer a question on the associated topic.
Unlike most other board games, you got to pick your route. You could go in any direction, meaning that if you rolled a 4, for example, and you didn’t want to to go the right and land on a pink space, you could opt to go the other direction and land on a different colour.
Because of the range of topics and therefore the difficulty of the questions, games often lasted anywhere between 30 minutes and 9 hours, with breaks given in the longer games to allow players a few minutes of fresh air, to see daylight or to obtain much needed food.