Why “Bastard Rules” are needed for Trivial Pursuit

Last night I was at my friend Danielle's place and we were having a bit of a board game night, after getting bored of Simpsons Road Rage on X-Box.

Now, there's a version of Murphy's Law that applies to Trivial Pursut: If you let another team off the hook for getting a question nearly right, and you let them roll again, they will get at least two pies on this same turn.

Last night the question was “What did 35 runners in the 2000 Berlin Marathon get disqualified for taking?” The other team's answer was 'public transportation', but the person answering the question, instead of saying 'be more specific', a la Jeopardy, they said “sure, close enough, it says 'subway'.” At that point I knew we were done for. The following questions and answers were agonizingly obvious to our team, but it took this other team a good 5 minutes to puzzle out each answer, but they would finally get it right out of sheer luck.

Which is why I also think Trivial Pursuit games should have a time limit of one minute per question, not so that people can't figure answers out, but to avoid the backtracking and second-guessing while everyone else just falls asleep.
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