The 95th Semi-Annual Williams Trivia Contest

What the heck is Williams Trivia?

Trivia is a Williams tradition since 1966. All Williams students, and anyone else for that matter, are invited to stay up on January 17, 2014, for a night of music and things-you-know-but-can't-quite-remember. It's the final exam for everything you never learned at Williams College.

We are Requiem for the Blue Civic, the team who is running this semester's contest by virtue of having won last May's contest. Take heed, that's the prize: if you win this contest, you get to run the next one. We've been playing Williams Trivia for many years, and May was our first win, so we have a lot of good trivia saved up.

What you'll need:

• At least one computer with an internet connection. More=better.
• As many friends as you can gather, representing as wide a variety of tastes as possible. There is no limit on team size. There have been Trivia teams with more than 80 people, and many with just one person.
• Snacks. Under no circumstances should snacks be omitted.
• Reference books. Courage. Fortitude. Your best kung fu and your best geek spirit. A will to survive.

How to play:

1. Once you've gathered your team, pick a name. Any name will do, but the best team names are answers to trivia questions.*
2. Before 10:00, go to www.williamstrivia.com and register your team. Find the link to the audio stream, and open that. That's how you'll hear questions.
3. Also click on the link to your team's chat room in the upper-left corner of the homepage. You'll be joined by a member of our team. That's how you'll send us answers.

What Will Happen:

• At 10:00, we will read a question over the air, and then play a song. You have the duration of the song to send us the answer to the question. You get one point for answering the question correctly, and one point for naming the song and artist.
• Now repeat. Those are the "on-air" questions, and they will continue all night.
• But wait, there's more! Every hour, we will post an Hour Bonus on the website. It will contain a set of questions on a particular topic, like "Cats" or "The Hunger Games" or "Miley Cyrus Videos". You have a full hour to answer them. You have a choice of using the internet or not; if you forsake Google (also known as "going commando"), your bonus will be worth more points.

• And even more! There will be two Super Boni, released at 10 pm and 2 am. (In Williams Trivia, the plural of "bonus" is "boni". It just is.) You have 4 hours for each of these.
• There's also the dreaded Ultra Bonus - a series of clues spread out over the whole night. You have to tell us what they mean. The sooner you do, the more points you get.
• We will also have at least one Action Trivia, which will require you to act out a scene, film it, and send us a link to the movie. Points for trivia and points for style.

More Info

Official rules for the contest are here.

Almost all the trivia from the past 94 contests is online in the Trivia archive at wso.williams.edu/orgs/trivia . If you want to see what questions and boni are like, go there. You can be confident that all the pictures on this page and on the flyer will be represented in the contest somewhere.

Some old folks still use email. The Trivia mailing list is where you can hear scathing reviews of the contest afterward, and also post your own postmortem. To join, go to wso.williams.edu/mailman/listinfo/trivia.

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So start forming your team and planning your snacks as soon as possible. Send any questions you have to me at mconger at domain umich.edu. We look forward to seeing you on Friday the 17th!

—Mark Conger, Williams '89
For Requiem for the Blue Civic

*The reason the best Trivia team names are answers to trivia questions is that the answer to the first question in the contest is, by tradition, the name of the host team. So you've got that going for you.