New Scaratings

I think that's the name. It's the trivia on those Ziosk devices (found mainly at Chili's and some Olive Gardens, from what a quick search tells me).

We went to dinner at Chili's and the Ziosk thing was there. I have a big problem with outsourcing jobs to machines (you can use the Ziosk to order/replace your waiter which is their hope but fuck that) so we just left it on the side of the table. My mom started fumbling with it after I mentioned that (she didn't know they could be used for that) and she found trivia. So we tried it out.

So there are a bunch of categories from which to choose, and when you do you enter an 11 question game. The game has a question counter of x/10 but then there is a final question between the top two scorers (ostensibly to decide a winner, but if you're thousands of points ahead it's just a formality; there's no one question comeback or wager system in place for that final question). What's nice is the implementation of images for some of the questions. For example, I had to visually recognize the cast of Bonanza for one question, and Lon Chaney for another (though that one had a text clue that could be used to answer it).

Another thing to note is it seems that your trivia competition is pulled in from many other restaurants, and you'll always have four or so opponents. The game fills itself with a maximum/minimum number of players. That is really nice. You won't be playing alone, ever. And the games are fast! I will estimate 50 questions per half hour, though I didn't think to time it. And you don't come into games late; they start when you do.

It's far from a perfect system, of course. While it's nice to have pure category games, I'd like to see deeper category options. And the questions are fairly easy. I can't say I had perfect games but I could get most questions. It would be interesting if they added a few games designed to be much harder than the rest. Another problem is it doesn't have the one thing that keeps me with buzztime: record keeping. Even if it was just averages per category and ranking those (I am not even asking for standardized questions across the network like buzztime, this is actually fine) that would be cool.

The question writers have a weird quirk where sometimes two answers will be very similar. Each time that happened, one of those was the answer. Red Squirrel/Gray Squirrel Lon Chaney Sr./Lon Chaney Jr. etc. Kind of a cop out but kind of exciting when you don't have a clue either way.

A big problem I noticed is the competition is pretty bad. I won most games by several thousand points (questions start at 800 points and count up to 2000 by the tenth question). I could miss several questions and have a comfortable lead. It would be nice if that 11th question had a wagering mechanism just to keep the game alive. Or make the 11th question a matching question with a ton of points up for grabs.

To sum up, here are the pros and cons of this trivia

Pros:

- More questions per hour
- No waiting for the next game to start/start out behind or late
- Always have competition
- Visual questions
- Category games are kind of like Buzztime premium games... just you can play whenever you want

Cons:

- No record keeping/permanent accounts
- No playing against people in the same restaurant as you (at least, not that I know of... perhaps clicking the same category at the same time has good odds?)
- Softball questions
- No trivia elite games/mixed categories


Changes they could make and have it be decent competition to buzztime:

- Accounts with at least minimal record keeping
- Harder games... perhaps even premium type games that have questions everyone in the network sees at the same time. Maybe something simple like 7-8 PM per day has these special games