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sdornan's Fact or Crap (Other)

[January 20, 2009 09:31:44 PM]

Fact or Crap is a competitive trivia game for up to six players. Players answer whether statements, located on provided cards, are true ("fact") or false ("crap").

== Objective ==
The game includes a huge number of tokens, which are placed in a pile near the game area. When a player gets a question correct they take a token from the pile. When a player gets a question wrong they add one of their tokens to the pile. The player with the most tokens when the pile is exhausted wins the game.

== Game play ==
All players start with seven tokens. The youngest player begins the game as the first card reader. He/she reads the other players a statement from the card. After the statement is read, the other players immediately lay down a card face-down that says whether they think the statement is "fact" or "crap." After all players have given an answer, they turn their answer cards face-up, revealing them to the other players. Tokens are then added/subtracted from each player's stash accordingly. Also, the player that answered first wins/loses an extra token in addition to the first token. After the three questions on a card, the next player becomes the card reader.

There is also another bonus type of cards called "Rush Hour" which were randomly distributed throughout the deck of cards. These were kind of cool. Each of this type of cards has five questions on them. The card reader chooses another player to compete against. The player reads each statement one after another to the chosen player who guesses whether the statements are fact or crap, just like the rest of the game. If the player gets a question correct, he/she gets a token. If the player gets a question wrong, the card reader gets a token. There was also an hourglass timer that gave this process a time limit. If the time runs out before all of the questions are played through, the remaining questions are not played.

== Problems ==
I'm all for keeping things simple and easy to play, but this game made Wii Sports look like Alpha Centauri. We could have played the same game by having someone read out random statements from Wikipedia as-is or reading a statement from Wikipedia but changing some part about it to make it untrue.

No one actually knows the stuff on these cards off the top of their head, so the game quickly degenerated into a randomized guessing game with two possible choices. In fact, the game encouraged guessing by giving you an extra token as an incentive for being the first player to answer. So if you did actually know an answer in the back of your head, you don't have enough time to think about it and dig it out.

== Suggested improvements ==
The statement cards should have included extra tidbits to provide context into why the statements are fact or crap. For example, if the statement was "The Lincoln Memorial is located in Washington, D.C.," which is a fact, the extra tidbit could be "The Lincoln Memorial was built in 1867 on the National Mall national park in Washington, D.C." If the statement was "The rings of the planet Saturn are completely solid," which is crap, the extra tidbit could be "Saturn's rings are composed of numerous small particles, mostly water ice, all independently orbiting Saturn." It's a simple addition, but at least you would feel like you were learning something while playing.

Also, the hourglass timer was completely useless for the Rush Hour segment. Since all of us ended up guessing anyway, we were done with the five statements on the Rush Hour cards way before the time was up.

The game doesn't need so many tokens. We never exhausted the pile because there were so many of them.

== Overall ==
Unfortunately, Fact or Crap was kinda crap. The group gave the game away to a teacher and his daughter soon after two rounds of play. I think we would have had a lot more fun if the group had instead purchased the Hannah Montana board game like I suggested.