Typically it’s John Moore asking the trivia questions on Moore in the Morning, but on Thanksgiving Day I’ll put him in the hot seat to help me test out a new trivia game from Dorling Kindersley. We’ll also explore a free recipe app that offers creative drinks as well as meals and play some clips from a new travel phrasebook that talks.
Gojee
Free
Gojee is a recipe recommendation service made up of equal parts food creativity and drink chemistry. Their curators pull the best selections from across 200+ food blogs and give them a splashy presentation. You can quickly swipe through photos of the meals with a glance at their ingredients, then when you’re ready to cook, tap the screen to take you to the blog the recipe calls home.
By feeding the app lists of ingredients you crave, have, or dislike, you can tweak the collection it gathers to focus on vegetarian, gluten-free, and other personal preferences.
While there are many free food apps out there, very few explore drink recipes. Gojee draws a weekly supply of creative cocktails, including non-alcoholic one, many with fun names like “Tequila Mockingbird”, “The Income Tax Cocktail”, or “The Charlie Sheen Will Rock You Like A Hurricane”.
Fodor’s Travel Phrases
Free
Whether you’re planning to travel the world or merely wish to surprise your multicultural neighbours, this handy phrase app from Fodor will help you master a basic selection of exchanges across 22 different languages. Merely tap on a phrase, such as “It’s nice to meet you” and the app will play a recording for you to listen and mimic while displaying how that phrase would be written.
The variety of languages is impressive with a range that goes from French, German, and Spanish, to Korean, Russian, and Arabic, to Turkish, Croatian, and even Swahili. The app comes with a free selection of phrases for them all and the option to buy $1.99 expansions for the languages you’re focusing on. Buying an expansion pack gets you an additional 400 words, phrases, and expressions to help with shopping, dining, and getting directions.
DK Quiz
Free
DK Quiz is the kind of trivia game that makes it fun to get questions right. Produced by Dorling Kindersley, whose illustrated fact books have been wowing kids for generations, you’ll find a wide breadth of subjects and difficulty levels to match players both young and experienced.
Each game is made up of 20 multiple choice rounds. The faster you are at answering correctly, the more points you will earn. You can play a game by yourself, just to see how many you can get right, or send a challenge to a friend by e-mail to see who can get the most points.
You can create games around sports, food, entertainment, history, geography, natural science, general knowledge, or science and technology. Playing will earn you coins that can be spent on assists that can freeze the clock, remove half the answers, or help you skip to the next question without penalty.
The basic game is free, but included are a number of bonus packs you can unlock by earning coins or by simply making an in-app purchase of $0.99 and up.
Recently there’s been a trend towards social guessing games built around drawing, singing, and spelling. DK Quiz has that same casual feel, but with an activity that will leave you feeling smarter.
