A recurring part of my experience as an American involves coming to terms with the extreme monetization and commodification of everything in life and, despite that, still choosing to look for beauty and meaning. My exploration of the Little Rock bar trivia scene, a community that has been steadily growing since the pandemic, has been a microcosm of this personal leitmotif.
While few of the bars and restaurants populating our Best of Arkansas list serve as venues for trivia, the popular pastime managed to get its own category for the first time this year: Best Place for Trivia.
That title was claimed by Flying Saucer Draught Emporium, which hosts an in-house — or totally independent — trivia night every Tuesday. I’ve been a regular trivia-goer for a couple of years now but, oddly enough, have yet to play a game at Flying Saucer.
Bar trivia, where nerds who go every week and drunk people who just walked in all duke it out in the intellectual arena, is more than a passing fad. While many parts of the millennial experience economy — escape rooms, axe throwing, etc. — have mostly gone the way of Blockbuster, trivia has proven to be an enduring social phenomenon popular among young and old crowds alike.
It’s a perfect symbiosis. Local eateries and watering holes get a boost in weeknight business while their patrons get to partake in a friendly competition and possibly win a gift card to put toward their tab. On any given night of the week, you can find multiple trivia games across the Little Rock area.
Businesses like Flying Saucer who do their own trivia are the exception, though, not the norm. Save for a handful of other places — Midtown Billiards and the LGBTQ+ bar the New 610 Center, for example — the bar trivia scene in Central Arkansas primarily consists of games run by out-of-state companies.
The first time I looked into bar trivia in Little Rock, I was initially turned off by the corporate vibe, which encourages participants to interact with the companies on social media in exchange for clues to upcoming questions and even extra points in real-life games. My hopes were not super high.
Challenge Entertainment
, a Memphis-based company, dominates the local bar trivia market with dozens of games a week at various venues, though GeeksWhoDrink, a Denver-based company with games aimed at a more hardcore crowd, has a small foothold in town.
Still, a small group of my friends, some of us former quiz bowlers hungry for a way to continue getting attention for being annoying know-it-alls, started checking out the games. After all, a bad game of trivia is still a night at the bar with friends.
We were surprised by how fun the Challenge Entertainment games were and found ourselves returning week after week, even though some of the early questions tend to be ridiculously easy. Most importantly, the corporate energy quickly fades into the background once the questions get going, allowing the character of Little Rock’s restaurants and residents to shine.
Every day, a new batch of questions is sent out to every Challenge Entertainment host for that night’s game. Every place hosting Challenge trivia on a given night plays through the same questions, but the game can feel totally different depending on where you go. On any given Wednesday evening, for example, you can choose from Fassler Hall, where you’ll have to dodge patrons clutching steins of beer as you turn in your answer, or Caverns + Forests Board Game Cafe, where the mood is more laid back and teams often have a tabletop game going at the same time. And those are just two of the five Wednesday locations in Little Rock that Challenge is responsible for.
“Each one of the different trivia shows are going to have a different vibe to them, definitely,” said Ryan Mullins, a local trivia host. Some of you may know Mullins, 38, as the karaoke DJ at White Water Tavern, but he’s been hosting trivia in Little Rock for a decade with Challenge.
A host’s choice of music alone can have a big impact on the game, Mullins said. Some hosts have a consistent playlist they shuffle through. Others take song requests from players. (At more family-oriented establishments like American Pie Pizza, the tunes tend to stay in the radio-friendly zone, if you want to bring the kids along.)
“I try my hardest to make every song that I play in some way related to the question that just happened,” Mullins said, “even if it’s something as simple as playing the theme music from a video game after asking a question about the video game.”
Once you’ve thrown an axe or escaped a room, you get the idea. But trivia stands apart. The questions not only test your knowledge, but peel back our metaphorical onion layers and lay bare part of what makes us human: our niche interests and the random factoids we commit to memory for no practical reason, and we become closer to one another as a result. I think that’s beautiful, even if it’s sometimes facilitated by a corporate entity. (What human experience isn’t, these days?)
“It’s a great opportunity to hang out with your friends and to get to know them in a way that you wouldn’t have gotten to before by finding out what kind of trivial pieces of knowledge that they know,” Mullins said.
In what other setting would you learn that your friend has an extensive knowledge of state birds or parts of the eyeball? You also quickly discover the areas you know absolutely nothing about. (My group has been sorely lacking someone knowledgeable about sports for a while.)
In the same way trivia taps into the universal experience of learning something and sharing it with other people, it’s also one of the few places left in our highly individualistic society where you see the direct, tangible results of working as a team. Everybody brings their own life experience to the table, and with it a unique collection of knowledge they’ve amassed. You stand a much greater chance of bringing home a prize together than alone.
The teams are another part of the trivia tapestry that could have an entire story dedicated to it. Once you start to go consistently, you notice the same team names popping up at the same places and begin to make mental notes of which ones to watch out for. Some of them have been together for years. Many trivia games feel like there’s an unspoken parallel competition over who has the funniest team name.
“One of my most regular teams that I’ve had throughout the years has been a team that’s been called ‘S and M with Friends,’ and it’s just because the ‘S and M’ stood for ‘Shelly and Melissa,’” Mullins said.
Being a trivia host is “an amazing side hustle,” Mullins said. “Some of my best friends are people that started out as trivia people.”
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