Review: HALF TRUTH Is a Different Kind of Trivia Game

Back in August, the GOAT of Jeopardy, Ken Jennings, and game designer Richard Garfield teamed up to launch a new trivia game on Kickstarter called Half Truth. This game was fully funded in only 3 hours and now everyone else is being given the chance to purchase the game. The game will launch on May 6 and is available for pre-orders now over at Studio 71 Games’ website for $30. Studio 71 was also generous enough to send me an early copy to try out and it’s a lot of fun.

The basics of the game are simple. Each card has a category and six answers. Of those six answers, only have of them are correct. Players then secretly guess which ones are correct and after all guesses have been made, they’re revealed and the card is flipped to show who was right and who was wrong. You’re allowed to guess up to three answers and you’ll gain bonus points for getting more correct, but you’ll also want to be careful because any wrong answers means you don’t score any points that turn. The die determines how far you move if all of your answers are correct and can even do things like double the amount of bonus points scored for multiple correct answers or even change the game to start looking for the incorrect answers.

It’s a very simple premise and is a lot more fun than you’d think, even when you only have one person to play with. That’s right, this makes for a decent two-player game. It’s not the best two-player game, but it does work. That being said, the game is designed to allow you and five of your friends to play together.

The questions cover a wide range of categories including information about cities and Game of Thrones and even music videos. There are 500 question cards in total which is a lot. The only problem is that there are some questions that I worry are too prone to become outdated like “Countries with a higher population density than Germany” or “The three most populous ‘Springfields’ in America.” While not terribly likely of changing, questions like those are very malleable. Now, keep in mind that these questions aren’t terribly common, so you’ll never have to worry about the vast majority of questions. However, I can see in 10+ years there being the possibility for some of these answers to change.

All in all, Half Truth is a lot of fun and worthwhile if you enjoy trivia games.