Wits & Wagers History
Dominic Crapuchettes started working on a trivia game in high school when Trivial Pursuit became popular. At the time, memorizing facts seemed, well, trivial to him. Therefore, he tried to develop a game that he called Conceptual Pursuit.
Figuring out how to determine whether people had a good understanding of a concept was a difficult hurdle to overcome. To do this, he realized there had to be a way to quantify the quality of a given answer. His solution was to make sure all the questions had a numerical answer and that the exact answers were unlikely to have been memorized by people. In this way, everyone could give an educated guess, and it could be determined whose answer was the best. This also resolved another problem that Dominic saw in Trivial Pursuit, that some people got easy questions and even worse, that others would complain about it (myself included).
It was not until 2003, when Dominic and Satish were testing ideas for the second release of North Star Games, that the idea of a trivia game resurfaced. The first idea Dominic developed was called Trivia Poker™ - the know-limit trivia game™. The first testing of Trivia Poker at a Game Party revealed that it was too exacting and competitive for non-gamers. In fact, it wasn't even a party game. It was a trivia game gone very strategic. To solve this problem, Dominic realized that people had to play against the house instead of against each other.
The next day, while Nate Heasley and Dominic talked about ways to turn the game into more of a party game, Nate suggested that the game should be more like Craps than Poker. After all, the Craps table is where all the shouting and cheering occurs in a Casino. It was his idea to place all of the answers face-up on the table with different payout odds, and bet upon which answer was the closest to the correct answer. Dominic did not like the idea of having random payout odds and fell upon a simple payout mechanism that would mimic a risk / reward matrix. Over the next few days, Nate and Dominic worked out over the phone the rest of the ideas for what would become the best trivia party game ever invented: Wits & Wagers!
It was then that the real grueling work began. Satish Pillalamarri and Dominic spent the next two years testing the game to work out the finer details in conjunction with production requirements. Satish took over the task of developing 3,000+ trivia questions from which to choose the best 700. Each question was tagged with over 30 pieces of information to end up with the best final mix. The task was monumental, but we think you'll all agree that the end result has justified of our laborious efforts. Enjoy!