Picking the Genesis Pack: The question we couldn't answer

The problem with knowing too much

When you're building a Bible trivia game, you start drowning in content. We had scripture scholars on the team, Bible professors who'd consulted, casual players who'd submitted ideas. Everyone had a different threshold for what "hard" meant. One question about the genealogy of Judah felt revelatory to someone. To someone else, it felt gatekeeping.

The Genesis Pack needed to be free. That meant it would be the first impression millions of people had with BIBL. It couldn't be a museum of obscure facts. It also couldn't be watered down to the point where a regular church attendee felt bored by Christmas on their first round. We needed questions that worked like a handshake, not a test.

The spreadsheet that nearly broke us

I spent a week building a matrix. Difficulty level (one to ten). Bible book (to ensure variety). Question type (multiple choice, matching, fill-in-the-blank). Testability (could we verify every answer against scripture without ambiguity?). We ditched anything that required interpretation or relied on a single translation.

That last rule was brutal. Some beautiful questions died because different Bible versions gave slightly different wording. For a trivia game, that's a liability. A player loses a point because they knew the verse but used the ESV instead of the KJV? We weren't building that game.

By the end, I had a spreadsheet with 187 questions marked for consideration and 13 criteria per row. It looked professional. It felt like nothing.

What the testers actually told us

We sent three different packs of 50 to volunteer testers. Church groups. Bible study leaders. People who play trivia for fun and people who play because their faith matters to them. Some overlapped, some didn't.

The feedback wasn't about difficulty. It was about resonance. "Do you know this story?" one tester wrote, marking a question about David and Bathsheba. "Because if you play this game, you should know this story." Another: "Why are there no questions about women?" We'd built the pack without noticing. We fixed that.

One question about the dimensions of Noah's ark felt like trivia. Another about what Noah's neighbours thought while he built it for 120 years - that landed differently. It made people pause. Both questions tested knowledge. Only one felt like it mattered.

The version we shipped

The final Genesis Pack has 50 questions. They span 39 books of the Bible. Roughly a third are from the Gospels (because that's where most players start). The rest push into the Old Testament and epistles, but never into the truly obscure corners. You won't encounter questions about the names of minor judges or the exact number of cedars Solomon used for the Temple.

Every question is verification-tested. Every answer is rooted in scripture, not commentary. And every single one passed the Sarah Test: it makes you think without making you feel foolish if you don't know the answer.

We included questions about doubt (Job), failure (Peter denying Jesus), family drama (Jacob and Esau), and justice. Not because they're easier. Because they're the questions that matter. A player who knows the answers walks away feeling like they understand something. A player who doesn't walks away wanting to read the passages again.

Why this matters for a game

Most trivia apps are built on novelty and difficulty spikes. Harder levels, rarer facts, points systems that reward obscurity. BIBL lives in a different space. It's competitive, sure. Quick Match has leaderboards. Pass and Play is absolutely a game. But the Genesis Pack had to do something else. It had to invite people in.

Free players will spend more time with those 50 questions than paying players spend with all the others combined. That's not a guess; it's how freemium games work. So the Genesis Pack can't be a demo. It has to be a complete thought. A complete conversation with scripture.