PHOTOGRAPH BY BENJAMIN C. TANKERSLEY


Whatever Happened To ... satish


Pillalamarri, left, and Dominic Crapuchettes.


their monthly Wits & Wagers game night at Silver Spring’s Mayorga Coffee. The pair, who met at the University of Maryland’s business school, had created their company in 2003 and soon afterward began hosting the event to promote their trivia-themed game. When The Washington Post featured the business partners in December 2007, Target had begun selling their game nationwide. The monthly game nights


spanned four years, ending in December when Mayorga’s Silver Spring location closed. But Crapuchettes, 40, and Pillalamarri, 31, are hedging their bets that Wits & Wagers soon will become a household name. The partners are


... a local trivia game’s creators


by Kris Coronado What, in dollars, is the most ever paid for a painting by elephants? This peculiar question was one of


many that North Star Games founders Dominic Crapuchettes and Satish Pillalamarri put to the attendees of


negotiating offers for a Wits & Wagers game show with CBS and Sony’s Embassy Row, which produces “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” They also are finalizing details for a Wits & Wagers iPhone application and talking to Disney and National Geographic about future partnerships. The team has expanded to five


people, who work out of Crapuchettes’s Bethesda basement. In Wits & Wagers, players guess the


answers to trivia questions and then place plastic chip bets on a game board


next to the response they believe is correct — theirs or their opponents’. The winner doesn’t have to be a trivia buff, which was important to Crapuchettes, who says he loved board games but was never good at Trivial Pursuit. Wits & Wagers is available in six


cultural adaptations, and a family edition debuted this spring. Another game that North Star released in 2008 — Say Anything, which lets players guess their friends’ answers to various questions — sells steadily at Wal-Mart, Toys R Us and other retail chains. Next year, Crapuchettes and Pillalamarri plan to unveil Crappy Birthday — a kind of Old Maid and Apples to Apples hybrid — and then curtail the development of new products to focus on expanding their current brands. The goal is to achieve the level of


success reached by the Seattle-based creators of Cranium. “What they did for board games in Seattle, we’re going to do in Washington, D.C.,” Crapuchettes said. “This is going to be a mecca of board games in five years’ time.” By the way, he said, $39,000 is still


the most ever paid for a painting by elephants.


serious fun


700 // Te number of questions included in a Wits & Wagers game set


(Continued from Page 3)


morning. I’ve always been reliable and very self-reliant; typical only child and typical Capricorn: I’ve never had lots of friends, but the ones I do have, I keep. This really is the perfect pursuit for


an introvert. It lets me — kind of forces me — to be social and involved without all the chitchat. We perform as one unit; we have to get to know one another without having to say a lot. I’m still able to connect with people and yet be up there with my bells, concentrating. You can really tell when we’ve,


ANSWER Trace Armstrong


pardon the pun, struck a chord with the congregation when they start humming along. It’s just beautiful. I get chills. I remember once when there was just three of us, and we played 28 bells. When we came out, everyone was looking at us like, “Where’s the rest of you?” But once we started playing, the music was like a river coming out of us and flowing through the church. They gave us a standing ovation, but really it was as if the entire room was part of the hymn, not just us. Of course, it can get messy. Bells


don’t ring, notes don’t get hit, people lose their place. But all that really matters is


4 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | June 20, 2010


that we all have to start together and end together. We can fall apart in the middle. When it does fall apart, I don’t like to leave with that mess still in my head. We’ll go back over it after the service just to prove to ourselves that we can still come together and have that be the music memory we go home with. I work full time as an auditor. It’s my job to go back and figure out why things don’t add up, what went wrong, so I can see how this attention to detail comes in handy. Music is precise. Math is precise. I like being precise. That’s another similarity with hand bells and auditing — things all have to ring true in the end.


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