Board Games
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150 free Board Games trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
70 free board game trivia questions with answers. Seventy questions on the games that live in the hall cupboard and the ones that took over game night in the last twenty years. The classic board game trivia covers chess (castling, en passant, the Ruy Lopez), Monopoly's Elizabeth Magie origins and its London properties, Scrabble's original name, Clue's inventor, Go, backgammon and the Royal Game of Ur. The modern half runs through Catan, Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, Dominion, Wingspan, Codenames and the Spiel des Jahres, with plenty of who-designed-it questions for hobby gamers. It works as a game-night warm-up or a pub quiz round. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia or the publisher's own material, and the source line sits under each question.
30 of 150 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In London Monopoly, which property occupies the Boardwalk slot as the most expensive square?
Mayfair
Mayfair, a district and not a street, sits beside Park Lane in the dark-blue set; Waddingtons boss Victor Watson and his secretary Marjory Phillips picked the London names on a 1935 day trip from Leeds.
Q 02In Catan, which resource do pasture hexes produce?
Wool
Wool comes from Catan's pasture hexes and helps pay for settlements and development cards, but roads and cities never need it, so a player rich in pasture still has to trade.
Q 03How many squares are on a standard chessboard?
64
64 squares make up the 8x8 board; in the old wheat-and-chessboard puzzle, one grain on the first square, doubled on each square after, adds up to more than 18 quintillion grains.
Q 04Which letter shares the top tile value of 10 points with Z in English-language Scrabble?
Q
Q and Z are the only 10-point tiles; inventor Alfred Butts set the values by counting how often each letter turned up in newspapers such as The New York Times.
Q 05Sir Leonard Woolley unearthed boards for which ancient pastime while excavating a Sumerian cemetery?
The Royal Game of Ur
The Royal Game of Ur: Woolley unearthed five boards in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, and Irving Finkel later reconstructed its rules from a Babylonian tablet dated 177 BC.
Q 06Which game won the first Spiel des Jahres, Germany's Game of the Year, in 1979?
Hare & Tortoise
Hare & Tortoise won as Hase und Igel, hare and hedgehog: the German edition followed the Brothers Grimm version of the fable, in which a hedgehog is the one who outwits the hare.
Q 07In Carcassonne, what is a follower called when it is laid on its side instead of standing upright?
Farmer
A farmer lies down as a reminder that it stays in its field for the rest of the game; fields score only at the end, three points for each completed city they touch.
Q 08In Ticket to Ride, what happens at game end to destination tickets a player failed to complete?
Their points are subtracted
Their points are subtracted: each unfinished destination ticket costs its face value at game end, and kept tickets can never be discarded, so late ticket draws are a gamble.
Q 09In Risk, which continent can be invaded through only one territory, making it the easiest to hold?
Australia
Australia can be attacked only through Indonesia, so one fortified border guards all four of its territories; the catch is a bonus of just two armies a turn.
Q 10In Pandemic, every player's pawn starts in which US city, home to the first research station?
Atlanta
Atlanta is where every pawn and the first research station begin, a nod to the real Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has its headquarters there.
Q 11From which country does the ancient strategy board game Go originate?
China
China is where Go began more than 2,500 years ago; it had reached Korea by the 5th century and Japan by the 7th, and the West later took the game's short name from Japanese.
Q 12Which German publisher first released Catan in 1995?
Kosmos
Kosmos, a Stuttgart book publisher founded in 1822 that moved into science kits in the 1920s and only later into games, released Catan in 1995.
Q 13Which 2014 Marc André game has players collecting gem chips as Renaissance merchants?
Splendor
Splendor's gem chips buy development cards, and every card then counts as a permanent gem of its own, so late in the game a player can buy cards without spending a single chip.
Q 21Which designer created Spirit Island, the 2017 cooperative game in which players are spirits defending an island from colonising invaders?
R. Eric Reuss
R. Eric Reuss designed Spirit Island as an answer to the many games that cast players as the colonisers, and he made the invader pieces white on purpose.
Q 22Which game designer created the whimsical board game Takenoko, featuring a panda and bamboo gardens?
Antoine Bauza
Antoine Bauza, who also designed 7 Wonders and Hanabi, set Takenoko in a Japanese emperor's garden, where a gardener grows the bamboo and a panda, a gift from the Chinese emperor, eats it.
Q 23Who co-designed the Kickstarter-funded winemaking game Viticulture with Alan Stone?
Jamey Stegmaier
Q 14Which chess piece can move any number of squares diagonally, horizontally, or vertically?
Queen
The Queen combines the rook's and bishop's moves, yet its medieval forerunner could step only one square diagonally; it gained its modern range in Spain in the 15th century.
Q 15What breed of dog is represented by the dog token in Monopoly?
Scottish Terrier
The Scottish Terrier, or Scottie, has outlasted several fellow tokens: a 2013 fan vote retired the iron in favour of a cat, and the thimble, boot and wheelbarrow went in 2017.
Q 16Dungeons & Dragons is often credited with popularizing which type of die?
D20 (twenty-sided)
D20 dice are far older than the game that made them famous: twenty-sided dice survive from Ptolemaic Egypt, some two thousand years before Dungeons & Dragons.
Q 17In the cooperative card game Hanabi, how do players hold their hands?
Outward, visible only to others
Outward, visible only to others: each Hanabi player sees every hand but their own, so the game is all about which of a few permitted clues to give; it won the 2013 Spiel des Jahres.
Q 18Which 2019 engine-building game by Elizabeth Hargrave has players filling forest, grassland and wetland habitats on their boards?
Wingspan
Wingspan's 170 bird cards take their powers from real species data; Hargrave, an amateur birder, said she chose the theme because there were too many games about castles and space.
Q 19Which guessing game was played on pencil-and-paper grids for decades before Milton Bradley's plastic version of 1967?
Battleship
Battleship was computerised in the 1970s, when Milton Bradley built a microprocessor into it and sold it as Electronic Battleship, a pioneer among the chip-driven toys of that decade.
Q 20In chess, which special move slides a king two squares towards a rook that then hops over it?
Castling
Castling is the only move that shifts two pieces at once, and it is illegal while the king is in check or would cross an attacked square, so it cannot be used to flee an attack.
Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone raised about $65,000 for Viticulture on Kickstarter in 2012 and set up Stonemaier Games so that they could publish it themselves.
Q 24Which game designer is credited with creating the imaginative card-based game Dixit?
Jean-Louis Roubira
Jean-Louis Roubira created Dixit, whose Latin title means 'he said' or 'she said': each round turns on what the storyteller says about a wordless picture card; it won the 2010 Spiel des Jahres.
Q 25Which game, patented by Elizabeth Magie in 1904, was the forerunner of Monopoly?
The Landlord's Game
The Landlord's Game was built to teach Henry George's single-tax ideas by showing how rents enrich landlords; Parker Brothers bought Magie's patent in 1935.
Q 26In Catan, rolling a seven forces the active player to move which piece?
The robber
The robber blocks its new hex from producing anything; the mover also steals a card from a neighbour, and anyone holding more than seven cards discards half.
Q 27In which country is the game of chess widely believed to have originated?
India
India's chaturanga, played by the 6th century, was named for the four divisions of an army: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots, the forerunners of today's pawns, knights, bishops and rooks.
Q 28In the original Ticket to Ride, what earns the 10-point end-game bonus?
Longest continuous route
The longest continuous route is worth 10 extra points at the end, and if several players tie for it, every one of them scores the full bonus.
Q 29Alfred Butts' word game carried which name immediately before James Brunot renamed it Scrabble in 1948?
Criss-Crosswords
Criss-Crosswords added a board to Butts's earlier tile game Lexiko; Brunot's family made the first Scrabble sets in a converted Connecticut schoolhouse, 2,400 of them in 1949, and lost money.
Q 30By what name is the game of Go known in Korea?
Baduk
Baduk is the Korean name for Go; Korea long played its own form, sunjang baduk, with a prescribed opening, until Japanese-style play replaced it in the early 20th century.