Remember the board game Trivial Pursuit? More to the point: Remember board games? Big, cartoon playing field printed on cardboard? Plastic game tokens? (Did you have a favorite?) Goofy rules? (You made up your own as the game became familiar, right?)

We’ve still got every board game we’ve played over the years, even the ones we’ve all agreed are the dumbest board games ever. They’re at the bottom of the pile, looking forlorn and weirdly brand-new at the same time. Old favorites that we still play from time to time, like Monopoly and Risk, are at or near the top of the pile.

The O-Folk play a game of Risk every time we’re all together. Traditionally, the game takes place around Christmas time and, as it turns out, once a year is probably about as many times as adults should play Risk, a board game that lasts four to six hours and starts with grand strategies and dreams but nearly always ends in crushed hopes and tears. That seems to hold true for Monopoly as well.

Scrabble’s a favorite that’s much more fun to play, in spite of the fact that our copy of the game has been around so long that several tiles are missing, the board is stained and peeling, and the box is falling apart. We have so much fun playing Scrabble that I have no doubt we’ll hang on to our ragged copy and keep playing on it for years to come, I suspect because we’re all equally bad at it. In the game as we play it, three-letter words are the norm, and adding ‘s’ to someone else’s word after mulling over all other options for ten or fifteen minutes is likewise typical. When one of us gets a five-letter word, there’s lots of whooping and a victory dance. If anyone should ever lay a seven-letter word on the board, I’m confident the celebrations will last into the wee hours, many champagne corks will be popped and the toasts will end only after much of the furniture has been broken.

And then there’s Trivial Pursuit, a game we had so much fun playing right after we bought it that we used to sit down for a game every week. That went on for what seemed like ever and ever, but really lasted only until we began to experience the frustration of knowing we’d heard the answer to a question before. What’s worse than feeling the answer is right on the tip of your tongue but your memory can’t be bothered to recall it because it’s, well, trivial?

We thought we’d be saved from this torment when we started buying additional cards for the game. If memory serves (it doesn’t, but let’s pretend it does), the first set we bought was the silver screen edition, thinking that might be fun because we occasionally watched movies, but the cards turned out to have questions that only someone with a PhD in film studies would be able to answer. When we bought the book-lover’s edition, we ran up against the same problem, and so we gradually lost interest.

Until a couple years ago when we were all sitting around, probably on Christmas afternoon, gorged on turkey or ham or whatever, and somebody asked, “Whatcha wanna do now?” It was too early to play Risk (Risk is traditionally played after dark, like all other nefarious activities) and nobody wanted to play Monopoly, so we were stuck for ideas until somebody said, “Y’know what game I really used to like playing? Trivial Pursuit. Whatever happened to that game?”

And so it came to pass that Trivial Pursuit came out of board-game purgatory. Not just the original game, but every one of the cards that we’d collected over the years. We figured, why not try playing the game with all of them? Each player could decide which game cards he wanted, except for the final question. We kept the rule that the other players got to decide the final question. It turned out to be a great idea. My Darling B even went on-line to find cards from four more games. We must have a million trivia questions to choose from now.