I love a good trivia game. One of the main problems you experience with trivia though is how fast it ages. A game with questions about “current affairs” or “pop culture” easily turns into a frustrating guessing match about random facts from five years ago that no one remembers.
Qrank solves this problem by continually updating its library to provide you with questions about events as soon as a single day after they take place. But don’t worry, even if you aren’t up on your current affairs there are still plenty of history, literature and science questions to keep you interested.
Today we’ll see how to use Qrank to challenge your friends and become the social trivia champion.
Getting Started
When you open up Qrank for the first time you’ll see a welcome screen and the option to either sign in or create an account.
Qrank: Your Social Quiz Addiction
If you’ve never played before, you’ll obviously need to setup an account. This process can take a couple of minutes because you have two screens of questions to go through.
Qrank asks you for an email address, password, name, sex, birth year, the city and state you’re from and your favorite quote. It may sound like a like for an iPhone app to ask but this information is being used to setup your personal Qrank profile. After all, that this is a social trivia game.
Creating an Account
Starting a Game
Qrank is simple enough to play that you could probably figure it out on your own, but just in case you have any trouble there is an automatic tutorial that pops up the first time you play.
Qrank walks you through the gameplay process
When you startup a game, Qrank will automatically locate other players in your area and pit you against them. After other players are located, you’ll be taken to the screen below where you’ll see a grid of question marks sectioned off into three separate levels: 200, 400 and 1,000. Just like Jeopardy, these are the point values and also correspond to the difficulty of the questions (1,000 being hardest).
Each question falls into one of four categories: History & Places, Literature, Science & Nature and Life (that last one is pretty vague). There are 20 questions on the board and you must answer 15 of them to complete a game.
The Question Screen
The two icons at the bottom are powerups. The first reveals the categories of the questions in a row of your choice and the second reveals hidden bonuses in a given row.
The powerups are on a timer so once you use one you’ll have to wait until the bar fills back up to use it again.
Question Powerups
Answering Questions
All questions come in the form of a multiple choice test with four possible answers. As you can see in the screenshot below, I was asked several questions that pertained to events that took place only a single day prior to playing. Also, as indicated by the KFC crack, some of the answers can be quite funny.
Questions from yesterday
As I mentioned above, even if you’re not an avid news watcher you can still fare pretty well. I was asked general information questions on everything from the purpose of Vitamin C to what the metal tip on the end of an umbrella is called. I enjoyed the scattered question topics as they make it hard to know what’s coming next.
Questions for anytime
Scoring and Powerups
After each question you’ll be taken back to the board to choose another until you’ve answered your 15 questions. The icons on the side show you other players that had the same question and how far ahead of or behind you they are. You are competing with these players to see who can answer the fastest. The quicker you respond, the more points you are awarded. Also after each question is a scoreboard so you can see how you rank throughout the competition.
As you play more and more, you’ll begin to win awards. Various goals include making it in the 100 global leaders or even losing miserably to your friends.
Scoreboard and Awards
Just as with the question selection screen, the icons at the bottom of this window are powerups that help you answer the questions. The snowflake freezes your time temporarily so you have time to think without running down your score, the percent icon shows you how popular each answer is with the other players, and the little list icon takes away two incorrect answers, doubling your odds of guessing the answer correctly.
Powerups
Social Media Integration
The social aspect of Qrank is a major feature that can really increase the fun factor because you’re actually competing against people you know. Qrank can check to see if any of your Facebook and Twitter friends are playing and allows you to connect with others via email or even Bump.
Social Media Integration
In addition to using social media to connect with others, Qrank also lets you post your results on your favorite networks. After each game, Qrank will ask if you want to push the results to Twitter and/or Facebook.
Qrank Live
As an alternative to having Qrank automatically grab players locally, you can setup a specific place for players to join using “Qrank Live.” This is a little more hit and miss (most of the time no one will be there) and is best if you actually have a friend or two in that location ready to play along.
Qrank Live
It seems that these location based games might somehow be tied into Qrank’s profit model. When I chose a local Starbucks as the location to setup a game, I was unexpectedly hit with a Starbucks customer survey. It was only one multiple-choice question though so it didn’t really bother me as much as it surprised me.
Worth A Try? Absolutely.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Qrank. Many free trivia games in the app store aren’t worth the time it takes to download them. Qrank however, is a pleasant surprise.
The questions are interesting, the gameplay is fast-paced and fun, the graphics are nice and the sound effects/music don’t get really annoying until a good five minutes in (better than most). In the end I really loved playing Qrank and had almost zero complaints about the whole experience. There don’t seem to be any bugs or glitches and the difficulty level is just right. I definitely recommend that anyone with a penchant for trivia give it a shot.
My one serious complaint came when I finished a game and came back an hour or so later to try another. It turns out, you can only play one game per day! My guess is that this has something to do with the fact that new questions must be written every day, but they could at least include an offline mode or something that gives you access to old questions. Simply not allowing people to play anymore seems a little harsh and is a great way to get users to delete your app.
You can only play once per day!?
Conclusion
To sum up, Qrank is an excellent little trivia game that perfectly nails that edgy and fun quiz genre reminiscent of “You Don’t Know Jack” from the 90s.
My biggest complaint is limited daily gameplay but I guess if the developers’ biggest problem is that people want to play more, things could be worse.
Go download your free copy of Qrank and give it a try. Then leave a comment and let us know what you think. Also tell us your high score. I scored a 5437 while stopping to take screenshots so I’m sure you can top me!
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