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Health & Fitness

More "Smartest Bar Six" at the Village Inn

 Buzztime is the on-screen trivia network available for free play at the Village Inn in Skokie (6050 Lincoln Avenue). Once you have settled in with an appetizer and a beverage, you can grab a Playmaker device and start playing Buzztime trivia.

 In my last post, I explained how to join Buzztime as a member—so you can earn (virtual) Badges, accumulate PlayersPlus Points, or earn a (virtual) Trophy.

 Buzztime offers regular, mixed-topic trivia games during most of the hours of the day, starting at 11:00 am and running well past midnight. Depending on when you are playing, the game will be ...

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 • Lunchtime Trivia (15-minute games from 11am to 2pm);

 • Countdown (30-minute games from 2pm to 10pm); or

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 • The Late Shift (15-minute games from 10pm to closing).

 However, between the hours of 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm, Buzztime offers specialty games, many of which are single-topic or single-theme. Here are some examples (a complete list is at http://www.buzztime.com/schedule.html):

 • The Pulse (Mondays, 7pm-8pm, current events in sports)

 • Glory Daze (Tuesdays, 6:30pm-7pm, 50s-70s pop culture)

 • Lexitopia (Wednesdays, 8:15pm-8:30 pm, obscure words)

 • Tuned In (Thursdays, 6:30pm-7pm, television trivia)

 • Spotlight (Fridays, 7pm-8pm, music/TV/movies/celebrities)

 • Playback (Saturdays, 7pm-8pm, six rounds of music trivia)

 These specialty games are a chance for those with "niche knowledge" to shine. In fact, on Thursday and Friday nights, Buzztime offers a 30-minute, 15-question game called Topix, with a different theme each night. The themes are announced on the Buzztime website and advertised on-screen during the day. Some recent August themes have been Mythical Creatures and Reality TV.

 After every Buzztime trivia game, the Local Leaderboard is displayed. This screen shows the top ten player scores for the current month (for the three regular games) or for the past year (for the specialty games). A few minutes later, the Network Rankings are displayed. These screens show the top 20 player scores (and venue combined scores) for that particular game, across the entire network—there are usually between 500 and 5,000 players!

 So, what's all this about the Smartest Bar Six

 Buzztime offers a game called Six on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. It's an hour-long game in four rounds featuring questions from six different categories: The Sciences, The World, The Shows, The Past, The Games, and The Arts. It's a lot like the original Trivial Pursuit® board game from the 1980s.

 In April and June, Buzztime ran regional on-screen qualifying games of The Six, called The Smartest Bar Six, on Monday nights. In April, a group of players from the Village Inn qualified in the midwest region for the tournament finals in August. There are only 80 venues (of thousands who sponsor Buzztime) in the August finals, and the Village Inn team is one of them.

 As it turns out, the August 5th scores had to be thrown out because of a technical computer glitch on Buzztime's part—some venues were playing a repeat game with questions they may have seen before. On August 12th, the Village Inn team placed 19th of the 80 teams, a significant achievement. 

 We'll be racking our brains again on August 19th and August 26th to try to improve our ranking. Stop by the Village Inn 8pm-9pm to cheer us on, or even to help us out! Our team score would have been higher last Monday if there has been a doctor (or a student of Greek) in the house to tell us that nosebleed is the more common term for epistaxis

 Until next time!

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