All Right, Trivia Nuts. What Goalie Went Up In Flames At A Hockey Game?

If you can remember as far back as last December, you may recall that a board game, Trivial Pursuit , was at the top of a lot of Christmas lists. Despite its not-so-trivial price of $30 to $40 retail, the question-and-answer game was often harder to dig up than Cabbage Patch dolls.

Operating on the theory that you can't have too much of a good thing, the three Canadians who created the game are marketing several spin-offs, one of which is—ta-dah!—All-Star Sports, featuring 6,000 questions on football, baseball, basketball, nicknames, numbers and a catchall category. (In Canada , hockey is substituted for basketball.)

"The numbers category is toughest because it requires the most specific knowledge," says Scott Abbott, 34, a former Canadian Press wire service sportswriter who thought up Trivial Pursuit with Chris Haney, 33, a onetime photo editor with The Gazette in Montreal . Chris's brother John, 38, an ex-hockey goalie who played for Colgate and pro teams in Austria and Denmark , helped to write the questions.

Abbott oversaw the production of the sports game. He was assisted by John Haney; Brian Hanna, a businessman and basketball buff; and Terry Scott, a Canadian Press sportswriter and baseball expert. Their common denominator was irreverence. "Anytime we could get something funny or offbeat or weird, we went for it," says Abbott. "We have a hockey question asking whether a goaltender has ever been set on fire during a hockey game. The answer is yes. We found a goalie in some league who stuck a package of matches in his pants. He got out of position and was scrambling back to the crease when a shot hit him in the pocket and ignited the matches."

But most of the questions are simply good tests of a sports fan's knowledge. "What we really want is the kind of question where, even if people don't get the answer right, they feel they still have a chance," says Abbott. Ideally, good players will spend many hours feeling they've got a chance, get about half the answers right and have fun the whole time.