Geeks Who Drink recently held a nation wide Star Trek Pub Quiz. I have made no secret of my love of Star Trek, so this seemed like an awesome opportunity. Unfortunately my regular trivia team was all unavailable, so I opted to go up to Portland alone and try and find a group that would have me, and fortunately I was welcomed onto an awesome team.
After a hard fought 8 rounds, and two tie-breakers, our team, Screw the Ocampa, was victorious! Curious to see how our team compared to the rest of the nation, I pulled the results from 27 other venues across the USA that were running the same quiz, which you can check out here. Of the 324 teams that competed, our team ended up with the 8th highest score in a 7-way tie for 14th place, putting us in the top 2.5% of the nation! The highest score came from a team out of New York, New York, which scored 85 out of a possible 88 points, and had the great name, There are 4 lights!!! While New York City may have been the venue with the highest score, the location with the highest proportion of high scores (>75%) was Tempe, Arizona, but they only had 6 teams competing. The city with the most teams was Austin Texas, but no team from that city scored better than 75%.
One of the hardest things about trivia, aside from the questions, is coming up with a team name. With 324 teams, there was a great selection of team names that were inspired by The Original Series (Spock On), The Next Generation (House of Picards), Deep Space Nine (My Nagus), Voyager (There’s a right way, a wrong way, and Janeway), and even Enterprise (Day TRIPPers)! There were some common themes amongst the names, with the most popular team name variant being anything to do with Red Shirts (e.g., Red Shirt Revenge, Red Shirt Insurance Policy, Redneck Redshirts etc.) which showed up 15 different times. The next most popular theme for a team name had to do with character names. No doubt the recent passing of Leonard Nimoy helped inspire some of the 11 different team names that featured Spock (e.g., Rock out with your Spock out (x2), Spock’s Beard (x2), Spock Stars etc.). Tied with Spock at 11 team name inspirations was Wesley Crusher (e.g., Shut Up Wesley (x8), The Wesley Crushers (x2), Wesley Crusher Sweater Collection etc.). Rounding out the team name mentions were Tribbles (10), Kirk (8), Picard (7), Pon-Farr (6), Gorn (6), Borg (5), Riker (5), Worf (5), Janeway (5), and Darmok (5). The majority of the team names play off general Star Trek Universe references, but there were quite a few names from other franchises, including Han Shot First (x2), This is the Place for the Stargate Quiz?, and my personal favorite Millenium Battlestar 5.
The futuristic utopia of Star Trek promotes community, inclusiveness, and infinite diversity in infinite combinations. For me, being able to walk onto an established team and be so welcome, truly exemplifies that the ideals of Star Trek are thriving in its fandom, LLAP.