What Were the Original ‘Trivial Pursuit’ Category Colors?

The original Trivial Pursuit category colors, from the Genus Edition, were as follows:

• Arts & Literature – Brown
• Entertainment – Pink
• Geography – Blue
• History – Yellow
• Science & Nature – Green
• Sports & Leisure – Orange

Note that Arts & Literature eventually changed to purple rather than the original brown.

Colors in Other Trivial Pursuit Editions

Parker Brothers has released more than 50 different versions of Trivial Pursuit since the original Genus edition hit store shelves in 1981.

Virtually all of those editions have maintained the same coloring scheme for categories as the original, though with different categories in each case. For instance, the Totally ’80s edition released in 2006 used the following category-color pairings:

• Headlines – Blue
• Movies – Yellow
• Music – Purple
• Sports & Leisure – Green
• Television – Pink
• Wild Card – Orange

How Do the Trivial Pursuit Category Colors Work?

The Trivial Pursuit category colors permeate every part of the game.

Gameplay involves each player moving their game piece around the board based on dice rolls, attempting to answer questions from whatever square they land on — those squares are color-coded to match the game categories.

If a player answers correctly, he gets to roll again. If not, his turn is over.

The object of the game is to collect all six colored wedges, each corresponding to a different category. A wedge earned only when a player correctly answers a category question after landing on the “hub” space on the gameboard corresponding to that that category.

Each category has only one hub space on the board, making it likely that a winning player will have answered many more than six total questions before gameplay concludes.

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