Recently, I’ve gotten into playing trivia at bars/restaurants. For the past year, my friends and I have gone almost weekly, but we may miss a week here or there if something comes up.

We started going to a place in Conshohocken, but each week there were more than 30 teams, and it was hard to find a table because there were so many people, so we decided to switch it up. We like the style of how the DJ ran trivia; so when we found out he was doing it Monday nights at a different restaurant in Manayunk, The Rook, we decided to try it out there.

I like going to The Rook because there are fewer teams, the food is better, and the employees are much nicer. We typically sit at the bar, so we’ve befriended the bartender and some of the servers as well as the DJ who runs trivia.

Photo credit: Dizain777 | Dreamstime.com

Each week there are five rounds, and your score from each round gets added up at the end to see who the winner is. Each round is different: The first round is general trivia; the second is a top 10 list (for example, one week it was top 10 names for a boy dog); the third is a picture round — sometimes it’s puzzles you need to figure out or it could be a still from a movie and you have to guess which one; next is Jeopardy. You get a point if you answer correctly; but if you answer wrong, you’ll lose a point, and if you leave it blank, your score stays the same. Lastly, the fifth round is the music round, where he plays a 30-second clip from a song, and you have to guess the artist and title. All the rounds are worth 10 points, except the music round — you can get up to 20 if you get the song title and the artist right. There is also typically a theme to the music round; and if you guess right, you can get five extra points. The theme is typically hard, so not a lot of people get it.

We’ve been getting pretty good at trivia; we’ve come in first place the past five or six Mondays, so now the pressure is on and we don’t want to break our streak! I always look forward to playing; it’s fun, really makes you think, and you may even learn something new.

— Mary Melnick, social media & editorial coordinator