Forget Call of Duty 5: World at War. I’ve discovered an online multiplayer game that’s more thrilling than Halo 3 and GTA: IV put together. Grand Theft Halo 7? No: Delta Coach In-seat Trivia.
I discovered this massively immersive game on a flight from Los Angeles to Atlanta. You compete live against other flyers on the plane to correctly answer multiple choice trivia questions as fast as possible to score the highest number of points. Sounds boring and lame, right? Wrong.
The challenge isn’t the difficulty of the trivia, which isn’t that tough. No. You’re on a plane. If there’s turbulence, the whole plane shakes, and makes it super hard to hit the right answer on the touch screen. Also, there’s your kids. Try remembering the name of the highest peak in North America (Mount McKinley) while your three-year-old is screaming that her sister took the blue crayon and blue is her favorite.
More compelling yet is that you’re only sort of playing against strangers. Instead of going up against an anonymous teenager in Hong Kong on Xbox Live, your enemies are on the flight with you. The game even tells you their seat number. You can psyche out “El Gato” in 34 E while walking to the bathroom.
If feeling intellectually superior to the coach-sitting masses doesn’t do it for you, there’s a bonus version of the trivia game. On the way home… you can cheat. Delta just doesn’t have that many questions. So on the return flight, you can ace out everyone and seem like a super genius to twenty semi-adjacent strangers who know where you’re sitting. Let your wife handle the kids.