There was a moment in time where a nation came together at a specific hour of the day, gathered around on their phones, and logged in to a single app to all play a game together. HQ Trivia was a phenomenon for its time, challenging people to participate in a daily trivia game in the hope of winning some cash. It was the brainchild of Vine creators Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll and ran from 2017 through 2022. Since it ceased operations, there hasn’t been anything like it, but Netflix has come up with an idea. It’s not an exact duplicate, but Netflix’s upcoming game show, Best Guess Live, carries many of the old HQ hallmarks and could be the game that fills the HQ-sized hole in everyone’s hearts.
Announced as part of Thursday’s formal Netflix Games hub launchBest Guess Live is a simple game on the surface. The idea is that players are given a contextless, 20 Questions-style clue. After the first clue, everyone is given the option to guess their answer within 20 seconds. The game will continue until five clues are given, the clues gradually being more descriptive. All players are given one, and only one, guess. The player who submits their answer with the fewest amounts of clues splits the prize pot.
In terms of the game itself, Best Guess Live and HQ Trivia couldn’t be more different. However, it’s in the presentation where the two share common qualities. They’re both live games with in-person hosts giving clues and reacting to player answers in real-time. For Netflix’s game, Sugar Rush host Hunter March and America’s Got Talent co-host Howie Mandel are the emcees. Both games unfold at the same time daily with Best Guess Live set to take place every weekday at 5:00 p.m. PT/8:00 p.m. ET. Finally, there’s the cash prize, where thousands of players will hope to take home a piece of the pot. Of course, there will often be the potential for a large percentage of those thousand players to answer correctly and share the money, so rarely will anybody have that four-to-five-digit prize pool all to themselves.
Shacknews was invited to the Netflix Vine Studios campus earlier this week to take part in one of the first Best Guess Live sessions. It had been so long since I had participated in this old routine of sitting in front of a phone and booting up a live game show with a human host in real-time that I had actually forgotten the name of HQ Trivia. After a few clues, after some quips from Hunter March, and after the fanfare of naming a winner, that old sense of familiarity began to set in. It was just like the old days. The game was different, but the dopamine hit from logging in at a specific time and competing with like-minded people in hopes of a reward felt the same.
I sure missed that feeling. That’s because live, appointment-type interactive game shows are often designed to offer the same rush that network TV trivia shows like Jeopardy deliver. It’s the idea of audience participation taken to the next level. It’s the need to log in at a specific time to join the rest of the pack. And it’s the aftermath, where one can vent about their experience (and wrong answers) to their family and to the internet at large. That type of massively multiplayer experience is sorely lacking in gaming. Why else do people like me still wax nostalgic over 1 vs. 100? It’s because gathering around with a community is fun and there are few communities anywhere in 2025 bigger than the Netflix subscriber base.
HQ Trivia eventually ran into a cash flow problem, one that ultimately left it permanently underwater. Best Guess Live will have the Netflix machine behind it, a machine that raked in $11.51 billion USD in revenue in its last fiscal quarter. It’s entirely feasible that this endeavor could last longer than HQ Trivia’s run. With the way the game is structured, it could also prove to be just as fun.
Best Guess Live is coming soon to Netflix and will be playable on iOS and Android. It’ll only be available in the United States for now, which is funny given Howie Mandel’s Canadian-ness. Anyone who used to carve out time for HQ Trivia should prepare to get that old feeling back.
