Ten years ago, when KFAN’s A.J. Mansour announced he was leaving the station for another gig, co-host Cory Cove of The Power Trip Morning Show decided to send his friend off with a trivia challenge. He called it The A.J. Game.
“It honestly was supposed to be just a really dumb, kind of easy, cheap, throwaway game,” Cove says. “But everybody really liked it. The instant feedback was overwhelmingly positive.”
Mansour didn’t stay away long; he came back to the station after about three days at his new job. And the duo brought the game back, too, as a regular Friday morning feature of the show. These days, it's known as The Initials Game.
The game isn’t really “dumb.” It’s actually eloquently simple, addictive, and easy to play—but not easy! First, Cove finds 12 persons, places, objects, phrases, pieces of media, or other things that share initials. For each round, he reads up to six clues that players use to figure out what is being described. The first player to yell out the correct answer gets a point.
For example, here’s one round from an installment played with WCCO hosts at the State Fair. The initials: B.P.
Clue 1: A 1998 miniseries about chef Gordon Ramsey was called this.
Clue 2: This show was connected to a then unknown 19-year-old Lady Gaga.
Clue 3: This was a 1993 film with Wesley Snipes and Dennis Hopper.
Clue 4: This was a hidden camera show on MTV.
Clue 5: This deals with vapor pressure.
Answer: boiling point!
As you can imagine, the possibilities are endless. In May, the radio version of the game turned 10 years old; last Friday was the show's 542nd installment of the game.
As a host of a morning show on a sports radio station, Cove originally created the game with sports dudes in mind, but he soon discovered that Initials was bringing in new audiences.
“We've had so many women basically say to us, ‘My dumb boyfriend listens to your show, and I thought it was stupid, but then I fell in love with The Initials Game, and then I kind of fell in love with the whole show in reverse,’” Cove says.
He also had a hunch that his game could thrive in other formats. In 2020, Cove set up a Kickstarter in hopes of turning The Initials Game into a card game that could be played at home. The goal was to raise $30K. It made $354,828. Four years later, they’re on their fourth game pack, with sets often selling out fast upon release.
But The Initials Game still hadn’t reached its final iteration. A year and a half ago, radio personality/hip-hop artist/man about town Sean McPherson put Cove in touch with Chuck Terhark, his Trivia Mafia cofounder, to see if they could turn it into a bar night.
“Listeners all know this game very well because it's super popular and it’s every Friday morning,” Terhark says. “But I had never listened to the sports show, I just heard about it because it's a trivia thing that everybody plays.”
He knows all about it now. It took over a year to develop an app that would let people play live smoothly (during the pandemic, TM moved to a paperless format). Trivia Mafia’s version of the game kicked off this summer with a regular night at Falling Knife Brewing Co.
“It was honestly even better than I pictured in my head,” Cove says of the launch. “It was super packed, and everybody had fun. And they had, like, 65 teams or something.”
It was also the first time Cove was able to play his game rather than being the host. “I write all the clues for the radio show, but I didn't do any of the content for this—Chuck and his team did,” he says. “I got to actually play, which is just super fun to be on the other side of it.”
“I think people like to have something to do when they’re going out with friends,” Terhark says of the enduring bar trivia phenomenon. “Most of our players are regular players who go up week after week, and they really make it. It becomes part of their lives.”
The bar iteration of The Initials Game quickly built up its teams of regulars. It's been such a hit that, several months later, seven different venues in town are hosting game nights during the week.
While Cove doesn’t have to worry about writing clues for the bar events, he’s still on the hook for the radio segments and upcoming card game releases. He’s not worried about that though; he’s got a massive backlog.
“I have a catalog on my computer of like 14,000 alphabetic items,” he says. “I also have an Excel spreadsheet of every combo I've used and when I've used them.”
As for the future of The Initials Game, Cove believes that it could still morph into another iteration, be it a video game, app, or television show.
“I had a couple of conversations with TV producers during Covid,” he says. “Like, true, legit ones that were going to try to pitch it to Game Show Network or Netflix. That's my ultimate goal. I would love it if it became a TV show at some point. I think it's essentially like a blue collar version of Jeopardy, right? Like, you have to be smart, but you don't have to be Jeopardy smart.”
