Right around the start of December, one of our student workers told me to download a certain game on my smart phone. Alexandra advised me to get Trivia Crack, a quiz app that allows users to test their brains against the brains of friends and/or strangers in head-to-head matchups. I took her recommendation and downloaded the game.

This is the logo for Trivia Crack, a very popular app out right now.

At first I was only playing Alexandra. Then I went home to Spokane and introduced my brother to it and soon enough I was playing him. Then some other people joined in. Later, my girlfriend hopped in on the fun. More random Facebook friends started challenging me. Before I knew it, I had several Trivia Crack games going on at once. During the holiday break I attended to all of the various individual games like I was one of those chess masters going from board to board. But then my holiday break ended and I flew back to the South and work started again. At about this time, I stopped caring about Trivia Crack.

When I went from lots of free time to very little free time, it was a no-brainer to cut back dramatically on Trivia Crack. But even if my holiday break was extended and I got even more time to live like a worthless bum I probably would have still cut back.  Why? Because Trivia Crack just isn’t a very good app.

My Trivia Crack profile.

If you can imagine a cross between Trivial Pursuit and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire smashed into a smart phone app, you got yourself Trivia Crack. The goal is to correctly answer a multiple choice question from six different categories across varying disciplines before your opponent does. To help along the way, based upon the amount of points you have, you are afforded the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire equivalent of lifelines where you can increase your chances of guessing the correct answer. You can chat with your opponent during the match and you can share pretty much every aspect of the game to your social media accounts.

Sounds fun, right? So what makes it not a very good app? Let me start with one word: Ads. Trivia Crack is overrun with long, annoying ads at every corner. Now I used to enjoy Kate Upton in her Game Of Thrones commercials but Trivia Crack pretty much killed that for me. I have been forced probably no less than 1,000 times to watch Kate yelling at the top of her lungs while riding her horse through the screen of my iPhone. It has lost its luster. But this is just one of the ads. Trivia Crack has way more ads than your normal app and these commercials get in the way of the game flow.

Trivia Crack also has the most annoying sound effects you can imagine. If you don’t have your phone on silent and you open up the app you will hit yourself in frustration. The theme music for Trivia Crack is brutal. The sounds produced for spinning the wheel, picking answers, choosing wrong answers, choosing right answers, losing games, and winning games will drive you crazy. Sometimes you can’t escape these annoying sounds because whereas you were considerate enough to silence your phone, your friend (or brother) sitting right next to you playing the game wasn’t.

Additionally, the game zaps the battery from your phone like no other. When I open the app or when I spin the wheel, I can just feel the percent of my charge going down. If you were on a 30 minute taxi ride, you would do your phone’s battery a big disservice by playing Trivia Crack non-stop the whole journey.

But the absolute worst part of Trivia Crack centers directly on what the game is all about…the questions. The word “consistency” is an absolute afterthought in this game. You can go from the most laughable easy question in the world to the most obscure, specific miniscule piece of knowledge that even a genius wouldn’t know. When I was in Spokane, my brother turned his iPhone in my direction to a Trivia Crack question that had a photo of the American flag with the text reading “What country does this flag represent?” At the other end of the spectrum, I have received a question asking me to identify the age at which some random composer started to play the cello with the options being 2, 3, 4, or 5 years. I have had questions asking me for such specific geographic information in some random country that it wouldn’t even make the Double Jeopardy $2,000 clue. I am not kidding you, the questions in Trivia Crack are absolutely all over the board. I honestly think the questions compromise the integrity of the game. I know there can’t be professionals writing them, but maybe the users who submit the questions should get certified in something.

An average question in Trivia Crack.

Trivia Crack was fun during the span where I had nothing to do for 14 days but it doesn’t deserve my time now that I am a functioning member of society again. If changes are made, I might give it 15 minutes of my time late at night while laying in bed but until then, no thanks. Don’t Blink.