Triviaverse by Netflix is a new “quick-hit trivia experience” that will be available on the streaming service on Tuesday. Games are generally around five minutes long, and you may play by yourself or against another person. I got to try it out ahead of the announcement on Tuesday, and we expect a lot of people will fill it up for heated trivia games with family and friends during the holidays.
This is how it works. You’ll choose whether to play single or against others, guided by your host, a strange pair of creepy glowing eyes. Each round consists of a progressively challenging sequence of trivia questions, with a minute to accurately answer as many as you can. According to a list of themes supplied by Netflix representative MoMo Zhou, you’ll be charged with completing trivia from a variety of areas, including animals, geography, science and technology, global history, sports, cuisine, music, movies and TV, art, literature, and “miscellaneous.”
Answers are shown next to a virtual D-pad, and you choose one by pushing that direction on your controller or keyboard, clicking on it with a mouse, or, if using a touchscreen device, simply touching the answer. The more trivia questions you successfully answer, the more points you’ll get, and if you have a streak of accurate answers, you’ll win even more points.
The rules alter somewhat depending on whether you’re playing with one or two people. You’ll face three one-minute bouts on your own. You and your partner will each execute two one-minute rounds, one at a time.
The game will total your score at the end. In single-player, you’ll be awarded a title depending on your performance against a series of “challenges,” which are just escalating sums of points. In two players, you don’t earn the title — only bragging rights. If you tie, there is no tiebreaker; instead, the game encourages you to play again.
Triviaverse matches need no setup and answer selection is rapid, making them great for a short game of trivia or massive trivia fights with friends and family. However, Triviaverse, like Netflix’s other interactive titles, will not function on a few platforms (including the Apple TV), so if you want to test it out, make sure you have a device that can play it.
Triviaverse is Netflix’s newest interactive title (remember Bandersnatch? ), but it’s also the service’s second foray into trivia after Quiz Quest, a 30-episode daily trivia series launched in April. It is also the next step in Netflix’s burgeoning gaming aspirations, which include a growing portfolio of mobile games and forays into cloud gaming. We believe Triviaverse’s quick pace will make it a hit, and depending on how well it does, we may see similar lightweight games arrive on Netflix in the future.
