Nowadays, it is not good enough to simply offer people a quiz game for them to play. The proliferation of the online marketplace as well as the ability to download and install apps of all shapes and sizes is such that punters want more from their quizzing, which is why the likes of Wordle became so popular and so often imitated. As a result, quiz and game makers are coming up with as many different ways of giving people a challenge as they can come up with. That is where the Box 2 Box quiz game comes in, as we’ll explain here.

How the Game Works

When you load up Box 2 Box, you are presented with loading page that offers a brief explanation of how to play along with a list of the following leagues for you to choose from:

• English League
• Spanish League
• Italian League
• German League
• French League
• Dutch League
• Argentine League
• Brazilian League

You will now how good you knowledge of the various leagues is, but you would be silly to pick the likes of the Brazilian League if you don’t actually know a huge amount about it. That is because of how the game itself works, with players being shown a 3-by-3 grid once they have chosen their league.

On the outskirts of that grid is certain information, with the country that you have chosen in the top left and then one set of criteria down the lefthand side and another load of criteria along the top. On the game that I played today, for example, the grid looked like this:

I have written that out to make it easier to understand, whereas in reality it says ‘TOT’ along with the Tottenham Hotspur Crest, ‘LIV’ with Liverpool’s crest and so on.

The first thing that you need to do in order to complete the game is to find a Tottenham, Liverpool and West Ham United player that has won the World Cup since 1958, putting their name into the search bar that comes up when you click on the appropriate box.

You then need to find a player who has played for Spurs and Burnley, as well as a Brazilian player who has played for Spurs. After that you need a Liverpool player who has played for Burnley and a third who is, or was, Brazilian.

Finally, you complete the grid by naming a West Ham United player who also played for Burnley and a West Ham Player who is, or was, Brazilian. When I’d done that, my grid looked as follows:

Carrying On

You might well have looked at the above and realised that there are several players who tick each of the boxes. That is because the second part of the game is to find as many players who meet each criteria as possible. If you can think of other players that have played for both Liverpool and Burnley then you enter their names too.

You can keep going until there are no more names to enter into the grid. Above the grid on the page you will find a bar that informs you how many boxes there are, which is nine, how many of them you have filled by naming all of the appropriate players, how many players you have named and what percentage of the players you have found.

Things to Bear in Mind

There are certain things that you will need to bear in mind as you sit down and try to work out the various players. For starters, the main game gives you just three minutes from ‘Kick-Off’ to complete the tasks at hand, so don’t be surprised if you run out of time before you find all of the names.

Secondly, there is a new grid revealed every day, so keep coming back to continue to test yourself. You should also remember that players can appear in multiple boxes, so if you can think of a journeyman player who has managed to play for numerous clubs then that can be a really good way of racking up the points.

The player’s nationality may not be the same as their country of birth, so don’t get confused if someone you know was born in Brazil isn’t coming up as Brazilian; they might have opted to play for Ecuador, say, on the international stage.

There are, of course, some players who have the same name as one another, so when that happens you will also see their date of birth as a helpful identifier. Make sure you’re clicking on the correct player if you want to ensure you get the point.

If you want to play the game in a more casual way then you can opt to have unlimited time. This means that there is no time pressure on you to complete the grid. You can also do just one aspect of it, should you choose to. As you can see from the table above, I chose to only enter the names of one footballer per grid, rather than putting in name after name.

It Can be a Communal Game

The challenge of Box 2 Box as a football quiz game is to test your own knowledge. You could obviously Google the answers if you want to, but doing so isn’t really testing yourself and is just showing how quickly you can look something up before typing it into a box.

There is always going to be a communal nature to games such as this, which is why many people will have messenger service groups in order to let their friends or work colleagues know how well they got on in their permitted three minutes. It is also encouraged by the makers of Box 2 Box, who have both a Discord Server and an Instagram page you can join if you want to.