Paul ThomasonHow good is your pop knowledge? Do you know which song was the first UK No1 hit for Cliff Richard?Or, can you name the year The Killers released ‘Hot Fuss’? Are you up for the challenge or will you be ‘one year out’?
Based on the long-running BBC Radio 2, Pop Music Quiz hosted by Ken Bruce, that is celebrating its 23rd anniversary this year, Popmaster Quiz Card Game is a challenging test of pop chart history for two players.
As with the radio show, the questions cover any charting genre from the past 60 years. This version of the game comes with over 200 questions and they are loosely based on the original format. The question arrangement and scoring is different but the difficulty level is very similar. If you regularly score in the early 20’s when Bruce is compering, chances are you will get around 50% of the answers right here.
Every question card has three different types of question that get increasingly hard in difficulty. Fail at one though and you will not get the chance to score from the remaining questions.
Up first is always a multiple choice of three answers, so even playing against someone with no level of pop knowledge they still have a one in three chance of gaining a point. The second questions are tougher as they need the challenger to provide a straight out answer.
With it being a card based question game there are no familiar bonus rounds to listen to clips and neither is there a final round to name three top 40 tracks from an artist. The most famous style question from the broadcast is “name the year” which has been included and each card has one of these questions to allow you to exclaim, “One year out!”
The game is aimed at age 14 and over but the musical knowledge of the contestants is much more of a factor to their level of enjoyment than their age.
Your enjoyment of this game will probably depend upon the participants knowing similar levels of pop facts, otherwise the game is likely to be very one-sided and neither side will be in a rush to play again. However, if the opponents are evenly matched pop-aficionados, then you are likely to enjoy the testing questions that force you to bring back some long forgotten memories of bands, performers, albums and hits.
The Ginger Fox Popmaster Quiz Game costs £5.99 from John Lewis.
Carmel Thomason
Steve Timms
Reece Donlan
Jemma Christie