The Franchise: Brainstormer is a San Francisco-based franchise specializing in both pub quizzes and providing trivia-centric entertainment for corporate events. Its website is a social networking marvel compared to those of Pub Quiz USA, Geeks Who Drink and All-Star Pop Culture — allowing users at home to register their teams and team members for League Play. From there, teams battle within their region for the highest cumulative score of an eight week season, vying for the $500 grand prize.
League Play has not made its way to Seattle yet, but you can still customize your standing within the national franchise with pictures and a brief bio. Although Brainstormer is a franchise heavy with intriguing new concepts and chances for expansion, pub quizzes live and die by live performances. How does Brainstormer stack up against its competitors?The Bar:
Pyramid Alehouse (SoDo, 1201 First Avenue South) serves as Brainstormer’s flagship Trivia Night within Seattle. That statement really just means that it’s much larger than Elephant and Castle, Brainstormer’s other installation within the city.
It could’ve been an unfair judgment to come here on the day of a Mariners game, but that’s probably not the case. After all, the game day run-off makes up a substantial chunk of Pyramid’s clientele. This run-off turned the beginning of the quiz into a chaotic affair that was made no easier by a lack of seating and an inevitably stressed service staff.
On the other hand, the ruckus combined with well-spaced booths and tables offers a luxury extremely few bars can afford their trivia nights — the ability to talk your team through questions at a reasonable volume without the fear of being overheard by unscrupulous question snipers.
The Host: Bob Deeken became a quizmaster for Brainstormer about three years ago after frequenting the franchise’s quizzes in San Francisco. These quizzes were hosted by Brainstormer’s owner, Liam McAtasney, who identified with the quiz enthusiast enough to have him hold the fort in Washington.
Bob has excellent diction and a soothing voice that’s more reminiscent of a radio baseball announcer than your average awkward quiz geek. Considering the noise, Bob’s clear and nearly banter-free presentation was refreshingly easy to follow. He might not have built as much of a connection to his audience, but for the purposes of Brainstormer’s prefab quiz nights, Deeken fit the role perfectly.
The Quiz: Brainstormer’s quizzes are incredibly diverse, well-organized and rarely either pathetically easy or impossibly hard. Literature, sports, current events and even science (gasp) were covered in one question or another; in stark contrast to All-Star Pop Culture, my fairly well-balanced team ended up contributing to the answer sheets more equally than I’d been used to. Sadly, from ads on the back of every specially branded answer sheet to mid-round identification, Brainstormer’s quiz never allows you forget where the night of entertainment came from — or at least that it didn’t come from Seattle.
The prizes were rather unimpressive besides First Place snagging a healthy parcel of Pyramid Alehouse credit — second place got a couple of coupons for free appetizers with a laundry list of conditions, the most irritating of which being that they couldn’t be used on a game night. It may be gauche to complain about swag you got from a free-of-charge pub quiz, but coupons are right alongside scratch tickets on the lame prize spectrum.
Special Effects: There was both a handout, visual-heavy round (this week: Match the Fictional Teacher to the Movie/TV Show) and an audio round with songs and artists selected by Bob Deeken himself. I appreciated the fact that Deeken was behind at least one of the rounds, but it still couldn’t kick the omnipresent feeling that he was more of an announcer than a trivia host (no offense meant to Mr. Deeken, as I’m sure the former pretty much universally carries much more prestige).
The Verdict: For all of Brainstormer’s solid questions, impressive special features and articulate hosting, its pub quiz just seems to be missing something. The cliche “soul” comes to mind, but Brainstormer isn’t exactly some evil global corporation and Bob Deeken is one of the nicer quizmasters I’ve ever interviewed. If I had to guess what the quiz was missing, it’d be an organic connection to its venue.
The fact that Pyramid Alehouse was so packed and only 5-6 teams entered the free quiz may just mean that the venue simply wasn’t built for trivia. Regardless, the whole affair was ultimately forgettable — more of a novelty of the Alehouse’s Wednesdays than an attention-commanding feature of the night.
Brainstormer isn’t bad, or even unpleasant, but when I thought about how there was no shortage of local quizmasters wracking their brains every week in the attempt to make something really special from the ground up — I felt kind of dirty filling out answer sheets mailed in from San Francisco.
The league aspect of Brainstormer might be a nice motivation for return visits, but unfortunately it hasn’t come to Seattle. Ultimately, it’s alot of ingredients to a great quiz night that went a little stale en route north.
