I had some time this morning to crunch some numbers. I had to take today off from work because my husband got called in for jury selection, and since we share one car…he needed it more than I did. So I took a look at exactly how we’ve been doing on the mystery rounds in the past eight trivia games we’ve played in 2024. And if this were to show up in the form of a report card, we’d definitely NOT want to show it to our parents!

Overall, we’ve answered 60 percent of all mystery round questions correct, which in school would be a D minus grade. Fail..Maybe some lenient school administrators might call this grade “passing,” but I call it “fail.” We just can’t seem to get enough of the questions correct in these rounds.

On average, we’ve blown 19 points out of 32 points each trivia night on mystery rounds alone. We’ve only gotten all eight points on five mystery rounds out of 32 total – and completely flunked two mystery rounds. It’s frustrating when we’re doing pretty well on the regular round questions and in the case of our most recent game – getting BOTH final questions correct – only to be left out of the prize zone because we can’t pick the correct celebrity names from a photo lineup. When did James van Der Beek get such a gigantic head and start dressing like Bill Nye? And why didn’t we know what Amy Smart looks like? Guess we haven’t seen her in enough things (Justified is the only thing I remember seeing her in recently). Is it bad for me to say that all blonde white actresses kind of look alike? Spank me! And who knew that Billy Crystal looks so strange as an older guy? Not us, apparently!

Although…now that I seeing this visual round on my tablet instead of my tiny phone, I can say “Yeah, this looks like Billy Crystal!” Behold our most recent mystery-round complete fail:

Oh well, it’s just a game, isn’t it? We have no choice but to chalk these points lost as “acceptable losses.” We’re either going to know ’em, or we aren’t. We average 2-3 players per game, and we only know what we know. We’re not gonna cheat (perish that thought)!

Maybe we’d do better on these rounds if we had more players, maybe they’re just not in our wheelhouse, maybe we’re just…dumb. Knowing all of the mystery (and other answers) in trivia games doesn’t necessarily make one “smart,” just like not knowing them doesn’t necessarily make you “dumb.” Schools aren’t going to test you on whether you can tell the difference between a photo of Camila Cabello and Jenna Ortega (we swear we knew that the photo wasn’t of you, Jenna, but we had to guess someone)! Canadian provincial capitals? Yeah, they might ask about those in school! Mary Tyler Moore spinoffs? Probably not!

All we can do is try to keep our feet – or tentacles – in rough trivia seas and survive to tell the stories of our harrowing tales of trivia knowledge fails! Besides, who wants to watch a series where everything goes right for the characters all of the time? Or read a pointless blog about a trivia team getting all of their trivia answers correct and winning every single game?

How boring would THAT be? 🥱🤔😉