Quick: Who directed the movie, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind?” Which of the following countries has the largest land area — Moldova, Fiji, Portugal, or Barbados? And what did Alfred Nobel invent in 1866?

If you know the answers to these and similar trivia questions, you’ll probably enjoy Smart Trivia from developer VIISAS Communications of Espoo, Finland. Smart Trivia is a mobile quiz game featuring some 1,200 trivia questions. Smart Trivia automatically tallies your score as you play, so you can play alone, compete against your previous best scores, or challenge others — either people the game matches you with or friends you invite with a built-in text-message generator.

Smart Trivia gets started by asking you which mode you want to play in. Single Player means you’re playing by yourself. Multiplayer means you are playing against one other person, typically someone the system pairs you with; it’s two players, each answering the same10 trivia questions. Private Games are those you invite friends to join. And My Profile is where you can add your photo and other facts about yourself that you want others to see.

Regardless of whether you play Smart Trivia alone or with others, the basic question-and-answer format is the same. First, the trivia question appears on the screen:

Then, you touch Options in the lower right-hand corner of the screen to bring up a list of possible answers. You touch your choice (or, if you are really stumped, scroll down to select Pass This Question), then touch Select, as shown below:

The percentages on the question screen indicate the relative difficulty of the question. As you can see above, nearly everyone got this one right! But not all the questions are so easy. That’s especially true, I discovered, when you play in Multiplayer mode. In fact, despite my very best efforts, Anita, a player the system matched me with, kicked my butt:

If you enjoy compiling stats, Smart Trivia also lets you check the high scores of other players, get a list of the best players of the day (and their scores), check out your own record of games won and lost, and much more.

I did encounter two rude surprises. First, if you answer a question incorrectly while in Single Player mode, your game is abruptly ended. That’s it, goodbye! Second, if you take longer than a minute to answer a question, you are rewarded with this humiliating “snoring” screen:

Smart Trivia is available from Ovi Store for $4.99. It takes up 0.19 megabytes, needs an open Internet connection, and runs on all Nokia S60 5th Edition devices.

And oh, yes, the answers to the opening questions, all taken from the Smart Trivia game, are: Steven Spielberg, Portugal, and dynamite. Good luck!