Two journalists, a game of Scrabble and a word: trivia.

Trivial Pursuit was devised in Montreal on the afternoon and evening of 15 December 1979, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia, whose article on the game was published in September 2024. Its two creators were journalists: Chris Haney, a photo editor at the Montreal Gazette, and Scott Abbott, a sports journalist with The Canadian Press. The encyclopedia says the two had met in 1975, when Haney arrived in Montreal to set up the news agency’s coverage of the 1976 Summer Olympics.

The encyclopedia places the idea at a game of Scrabble in Haney’s Montreal home. Haney, it says, had just bought another copy of that game and wondered aloud whether the two of them could come up with one of their own; when he asked what it might be about, Abbott answered “trivia.” The basic shape of the game — a trivia board game with questions divided into six broad categories — came together in a few hours. The same article says the pair have rejected stories that the game was dreamed up in a bar, and notes that a 1988 CBC television film about its creation, Breaking All the Rules, told a looser version of events.

The name, the encyclopedia explains, borrows a common phrase for a frivolous pastime, and at the same time describes what players do: pursue the answers to trivia questions.

Turning the idea into a product took longer. The encyclopedia says Haney and Abbott visited a Montreal toy fair posing as a reporter-and-photographer team to learn how board games were designed, made and marketed, and then brought in two partners: Haney’s brother John Haney, a former professional hockey player, and John’s friend Ed Werner, a corporate lawyer. The four raised money by offering shares to friends, family and colleagues, and it took about two years to write the initial set of questions and gather enough orders for a production run. The game went on sale in Canada in 1981.

Horn Abbot, a run of licensees and Hasbro.

The rights stayed with the companies the creators set up. A CBC News report of 31 March 2008 names them as Horn Abbot Ltd. of Toronto and its offshore counterpart, Horn Abbot International of Barbados, and says both still belonged to the founders, creators and original investors at that point. Other companies made and sold the game under licence. The CBC report says the game made its United States debut at a New York toy fair in 1982 but did not take off there at once, and that the creators secured a US production and distribution deal in 1983.

English Wikipedia records the American licensees in turn. The rights were licensed to Selchow & Righter — the New York company that also made Scrabble — in 1982, and then to Parker Brothers in 1988. Selchow & Righter had been bought by Coleco in 1986, Wikipedia says, and Parker Brothers came into the Hasbro group in 1991, when Hasbro acquired Tonka, its parent at the time.

The arrangement ended in 2008. According to the CBC report, Hasbro, which had long made and sold Trivial Pursuit under licence, announced on 31 March 2008 that it had bought the intellectual rights to the game outright from the two Horn Abbot companies. Hasbro has owned Trivial Pursuit since 2008, and its then chief operating officer, Brian Goldner, said in a statement quoted by CBC that the company planned to take the brand into entertainment, publishing, promotions and digital formats.

Those formats had already begun to appear. Wikipedia dates an online version to September 2003, and The Canadian Encyclopedia records television game shows based on the game in the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain, including a version hosted by LeVar Burton that was set to premiere on the CW network in October 2024. A long-running claim to the idea ended in June 2007, when a Nova Scotia judge ruled against David Wall, who had said he described the game to Haney in 1979, ABC News reported on 26 June 2007.

On 6 November 2025 The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, inducted Trivial Pursuit into the National Toy Hall of Fame, alongside Battleship and slime, in its class of 2025.

Design and documentation.

A board game brand is carried less by any single object than by a set of printed parts that travel together: a box lid, a board, a handful of tokens or dice, and a folded sheet of rules. The lid does most of the public work, because it sits on a shelf and has to name the game, show what kind of play is inside and carry the maker’s mark, often at a size that reads from across a shop.

Inside, the board turns the game’s logic into a layout of spaces, tracks and colour-coded zones, and the tokens, cards and score pads repeat that colour code in miniature. Rule sheets are the quiet part of the identity, with their own headings, diagrams and house style, and they are often revised when a game is reissued.

Game names also change hands more often than their players notice, so the company printed on a lid may not be the one that first published it. Each guide separates what dated, independent sources record about a game’s origins, owners and editions from what the companies say about themselves.

A wheel, a hub and six coloured wedges.

The Trivial Pursuit identity is built into the game itself. English Wikipedia describes the board as a wheel with six spokes, with a hexagonal hub at the centre and a “category headquarters” space at the end of each spoke. Every space carries a colour that tells the player which kind of question comes next, so the board works as a colour-coded diagram of the whole game before a single card is read.

The six colours travel furthest. In the original version, Wikipedia says, Geography is blue, Entertainment pink, History yellow, Science & Nature green and Sports & Leisure orange, while Art & Literature was brown and later became purple. The board spaces and the scoring wedges share that code, and The Strong’s 2025 citation describes players racing to collect pie wedges in six colours.

Those scoring pieces give Trivial Pursuit its signature object. Wikipedia describes round playing pieces divided into six sections, like a pie, into which players slot small plastic wedges — sometimes nicknamed “cheese” — as they answer correctly on each headquarters space. A full piece, with every colour in place, is the goal of the game.

Around that core the brand has been stretched across many editions. Wikipedia calls the original release the Genus edition and lists general-knowledge follow-ups such as Genus II, a Junior Edition dated to 1985, decade-themed sets and licensed tie-ins. Each one keeps the wheel, the hub and the six-colour wedge system, changing the questions and the box art rather than the structure.

For a design guide, Trivial Pursuit shows how a colour code can carry a brand: six flat colours, repeated across board and pieces, tie every edition together. Compare it with Monopoly, another Parker Brothers and Hasbro board game, and Scrabble, the game its creators were playing when they devised it. For this guide we use geography blue, wedge orange and card cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Trivial Pursuit’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.