Okay, Trivial Pursuit might not be the MOST important game from my childhood; I liked baseball a lot more, and making space stations and such out of interesting garbage probably had more to say about the kind of person I'd be as an adult.

But the word "important"—in English, at least—seems to call for something of a different character. So: Trivial Pursuit, a game that has the symbolic bonus of being almost exactly as old as I am.

Briefly, Trivial Pursuit is a trivia board game. Players roll dice to determine where on the game board they can go, and depending on where they land, they answer a question from one of six categories. I think they were something like geography, history, entertainment, sports, science, and literature. By landing on special locations and then answering a question correctly, you could earn a little wedge-shaped piece of plastic corresponding to the category of the question you got right. Once you collected wedges (we called them "pieces of the pie") from all of the categories, you only had to answer one last question correctly to win.

My extended family played that game at holiday gatherings since before I can remember. And since kids don't know much trivia but also hate to be left out of things, my siblings and I each got teamed up with adults.

By far the best person to get teamed up with was Aunt Mary Ann; well-read, widely-travelled, and old enough to know about the 1960's but young enough to stay awake through the after-dinner games.

Which brings me to the most unpredictable teammates: our grandparents. True, they were unreliable partners in many ways; they were often either busy and popping in and out of the room, or sleepy and popping in and out of consciousness. But if you were teamed up with a grandparent, you had a super power that no one else in the room had: 1930's movie knowledge. Even Aunt Mary Ann was often stumped by Trivial Pursuit's questions about who starred in what film version of some musical sometime in the impossibly distant past. But you, lucky teammate of a beloved and snoozing grandparent, needed only to poke your partner gently, repeat the question, lean your ear over for their quietly delivered answer, and then proudly announce to the room: "Ginger Rogers". Whoever that is.