It's Fun; It Says So in the Name

Board game publisher Repos Production has plenty of solid games in their catalog, but their most recent successes have been in the "party game" space. Just One and So Clover both continue to be played in my gaming group, so it's no surprise that we'd take a chance on their latest, Fun Facts.

A group of 4 to 8 players each takes a wipe-off plastic slate and fields personal questions one at a time. Every question has a numerical answer. "On a scale of 0 to 100, how much do you like your first name?" "How long have you been practicing your favorite hobby?" "How many times have you been skiing?" Everyone secretly writes their own answer, and then one by one must rank their answers in ascending order, without looking at what anyone else has written. When everyone has placed their answer on the top, bottom, or somewhere in the middle of the answers that players ranked before them, all is revealed. You remove answers that aren't arranged in the proper order, and the group collectively scores 1 point for each answer that remains. Over the course of 8 questions, you try to amass the best score you can.

With this game, designer Kasper Lapp (whose credits include the quirky Magic Maze), has tackled what I think may be one of the trickier challenges in game design. Fun Facts isn't just a party game, it's basically a "get to know you" game. I've played my share of those over the years -- and while it may be the introverted side of me talking, I find them to generally be terrible. Maybe it's that so many of these kinds of games are half-hearted, mass market efforts -- the kind you find at 50% off in the snaking checkout queue of a store that generally doesn't actually sell board games. It doesn't feel to me like much thought is usually brought to bear on these kinds of games.

Fun Facts feels different. Certainly, it won't be for everyone. If, for example, you and your gaming group can't get with the fact that Just One sort of has a score, but it sort of doesn't really matter, Fun Facts isn't going to win you over. But like Just One, Fun Facts feels like a game and not merely an activity. You have to think about the questions, think about the answers you give, think about where you place them -- and you find yourself second-guessing yourself at many steps of the way.

The questions in the game feel carefully curated, too. I don't get the sense that Kasper Lapp just wrote down the first couple hundred questions that occurred to him and called it a day; most of what's here really does make you think. We played multiple times in our first session, and while we did reject a few questions (something the game encourages you to do if you think a question isn't good for your group), we generally found a variety that worked for "all ages" and got you thinking about things in a different way.

Okay, this is a "get to know you better" game. You'd be completely lost trying to play this with total strangers. But it was fun and sometimes surprising to learn things about people I've known for decades (how much they really love to cook, how much they'd say the weather affects their mood), and fun to discuss oddball minutia with them (does showering count as time "working on your appearance" in the morning?").

Fun Facts was recently nominated as one of this year's three candidates for Spiel des Jahres. While I haven't played the other two nominees yet, I think this sets a high bar for the others to "win my vote." (The vote I don't actually get, to be clear.) My prediction, based on the taste preferences indicated by past award winners, is that Fun Facts probably won't win. But I also have another prediction: this is going to become the go-to "one more game?" option on nights where we have large groups. Simple, elegant, and fun, I give Fun Facts an A-.