12 Great Gifts for Trivia Buffs

Some people live for the thrill of hearing a trivia question—be it in a bar, during a board game, on a quiz show, or elsewhere—and knowing the answer immediately. Here are 12 gifts, from books to games and beyond, that will help them hone their skills and share that thrill with others.

1. The Ultimate Book of Pub Trivia by the Smartest Guy in the Bar; $13

The self-proclaimed “smartest guy in the bar” is Jeopardy! champion and longtime pub trivia host Austin Rogers, which does make him uniquely qualified to write a book filled with entertaining trivia. This one has more than 300 10-question rounds whose categories run the gamut from catch-all (e.g. “Random Stuff You Might Know”) to extremely esoteric (e.g. “Hudson Valley, New York”). There’s also a sidebar on each page featuring even more fun facts.

Buy it: Amazon

2. Wit’s End; $40

Wit’s End is a board game in which players (or teams) compete to reach the center of the board first. Each space you land on corresponds to one of four types of trivia questions: “Teaser,” where you solve a riddle; “Odd-1-Out,” where you choose the item that doesn’t belong in a given group; “Sequence,” which asks you to put items in a certain order; and “Wild Card,” which speaks for itself. It’s a great gift for a trivia lover who wants a challenge—because knowing a single fact isn’t always enough to win the round. One “Sequence” question, for example, asks you to arrange Big Bird, Michelangelo’s David, and the average Christmas tree in height order.

Buy it: Amazon

3. Think You Know It All? Activity Book; $14

Think You Know It All? is perfect for any person who loves Sporcle and wishes workbooks didn’t stop after grade school. It takes a completist view of testing your general knowledge, asking, for instance, that you name all 12 birthstones, all 38 Shakespeare plays, or all the James Bond films in order. Each activity is sort of like a crossword puzzle in that you can start it as a solitary challenge and then fill in any gaps by crowdsourcing from whoever else happens to be around.

Buy it: Amazon

4. Random Wikipedia Page QR Code Coasters; $13

Know someone whose happy place is deep down a Wikipedia rabbit hole? Send them straight there with this set of four Redbubble coasters designed by Kevin-HPT: On each coaster is a QR code that takes you to a different random Wikipedia page every time you scan it with a smartphone. If your recipient isn’t in the market for coasters, the QR code is also available on nearly two dozen other products, including stickers, magnets, a tote bag, notebooks, and apparel. There are even separate versions of the QR code (on the product of your choosing) for the French-, German-, and Spanish-language editions of Wikipedia.

Buy it: Redbubble

5. Chronology; $23

Give the history buff in your life a chance to show off. Chronology goes beyond asking what happened in history and asks players to pin down when it happened—or, more specifically, when it happened in relation to other historical events. Basically, each card lists a historical event, but some are dated and some are undated. Each player puts their dated cards in order and then spends the rest of the game trying to correctly place undated cards within the timeline.

Buy it: Amazon

6. Movie Locations Puzzle & Trivia Game; $25

Uncommon Goods has a tidy answer to the conundrum of what to get your favorite puzzle-obsessed, movie-loving trivia champion: a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle illustrated with 50 iconic filming locations and clues that help you guess the corresponding film. They’re all well-known classics, so the difficulty level of that guessing component is easy—if you’re looking at the finished puzzle, that is. It’s much tougher (and arguably more fun) if you’re trying to identify a movie when, say, half the words and half the image are still unassembled.

Buy it: Uncommon Goods

7. The Curious History of the Crossword Puzzle; from $50

Crossword puzzles have changed quite a bit since the first one was printed in 1913. Ben Tausig explores that evolution in The Curious History of the Crossword Puzzle, which contains 100 crosswords published between 1913 and 2013. It’s a fitting gift for an avid crossword puzzler who loves to learn how things came to be—and they’ll get to find out how well their own puzzle-solving skills translate across older iterations of the pastime. The book is seemingly out of print, so it’s also a bit of a collector’s item.

Buy it: Amazon

8. All of Us; $11

Too often are the different generations pitted against each other; All of Us nobly requires them instead to work together. The rules are simple: Players split into two teams and take turns answering trivia questions before the timer runs out. But the question cards are categorized by generation—Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z—and individuals can choose cards from their own generation. So older players won’t be at a disadvantage if they’re not up on current news and pop culture, and younger players won’t feel sidelined for not knowing everything that happened before their time. (If you’re down for an extra challenge, though, you can always opt to choose a card from a different generation’s pile.)

Buy it: Amazon

9. The Moops T-Shirt; From $16

In season 4, episode 7 of Seinfeld (“The Bubble Boy”), George and Susan play Trivial Pursuit with Donald, a boy who lives inside a plastic bubble. A fight occurs between George and Donald after George won’t admit that Donald’s answer to “Who invaded Spain in the 8th century?” is correct: Donald said “the Moors,” but the card reads the Moops—an obvious misprint. (The situation was actually inspired by that exact misprint, which staff writer Bill Masters noticed in a 1970s Jeopardy! board game.) Sure, this T-shirt—available in eight different styles and more than two dozen colors—is unintelligible to anyone unfamiliar with that moment. But to those in the know, it’s a top-notch inside joke and also a tribute to the pedantry of trivia players.

Buy it: TeePublic

10. Half Truth; $20

In Half Truth, the brainchild of Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings and Magic: The Gathering inventor Richard Garfield, players don’t have to know everything about everything—they just have to know a little about a lot of things. Each card lists six items in a given category, but half the items don’t belong there. For example: The category “Colognes for men” lists Network, Mother Road 66, Öd, Lymph, One Man Show, and Fluff Magnet, only three of which are real men’s colognes. You only have to identify one correct response in order to gain points, but those points are null if you include any incorrect responses in your guess. It’s a fun exercise in making veteran trivia players change their general strategy—because in this game, the wrong answers matter just as much as the right ones.

Buy it: Amazon

11. Mental Floss Amazing Facts 2024 Calendar; $14

Nothing says “I love trivia” more than a fact-a-day desk calendar, so here’s Mental Floss’s own contribution to the cause. The daily facts—deep cuts from our Amazing Fact Generator and other amusing tidbits the writers and editors have come across in their research—cover weird animal traits, little-known word origins, and everything in between.

Buy it: Amazon

12. Linkee; $8

Linkee is a crowd-pleasing party game in which your goal isn’t necessarily to answer each of the four questions on your card—it’s to figure out what links them and shout “Linkee!” before your opponent can. (In fact, it’s not unlike Ken Jennings’s Kennections series, though that only exists online, doesn’t involve teams or yelling, and probably ranks higher than Linkee in terms of difficulty.)

Buy it: Amazon