Is Variety the Spice of Life ?

I’ll tell you why I ask. Its because after a bit of soul searching I introduced a slightly different format of questions in my quiz in the rugby club last night. Fifteen years ago I was the first to introduce a connections quiz to the good people of the club. I say introduce, because I never invented the format, whereby you’d ask three seemingly unconnected questions, then for the fourth question teams would have to look at the answers and say whatever they thought the connection between the three of them was. I got it from an open quiz during the days of the late lamented Neath Quiz League, in which was compiled by a good quizzer called Geoff Evans. Geoff had doubtless had the idea from another quiz he’d attended, and so on. Connections caught on in the club, and every third quiz I do tends to be a connections quiz . By only doing it every third quiz people’s appetite is whetted, and they do tend to ask me if it’ll be a connections quiz, and seem disappointed if I say no. Maybe they just don’t like my normal quizzes, however that’s by the by. The connections idea has been copied in the club, though, and the other regular setter, and two of the semi regulars like to use the format themselves from time to time.

Last night I did something slightly different. If I can make an analogy with Only Connect, if the connections in the usual connections quiz are like the first round in Only Connect, then the ones I used last night were more like the second round of Only Connect. So a typical set of 4 questions was like this one I used : -

1) In the Book of Genesis, what was said to have been built from gopher wood ?
2) A station on the London Underground shares the same name with a station on the Paris Metro. Which name ?
3) Peter the Hermit was a key figure in which historical event ?
4) Look at your last three answers, and then say what would come next in the sequence.
Please don’t think I’m insulting your intelligence if I give the answers – but they are : -
1) Noahs ARK
2) TEMPLE
3) The First CRUSADE
4) Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones films. Acceptable answers were the words Crystal, Skull , or anything containing those words. I might have given it just for the one word kingdom , but since no team gave just that one word this wasn’t a decision I had to make.

I was a little worried that , in the same way that many people find that round two of Only Connect is harder than round one ( I did ! ) I was worried that this may prove to be a bit too hard , but actually the scores held up surprisingly well last night. To the point that a couple of people even congratulated me on the idea ( not mine, but I’ll take all the praise I can get ) . So I think I’ll definitely give it another shot in a couple of weeks. The only difficulty is coming up with the sequences , but then I do have a bit of time to work on it.