Fun Facts is a cooperative card game for 4-8 players. It takes 30 minutes … or it can be as long or as short as you want, as it’s a cooperative party game.

The components are pretty minimal: 8 plastic chevrons, 8 pens, a bunch of cards, a rulebook and a “first player” scoring star. See components below.

Gameplay

Each player takes a plastic colored chevron and the appropriate pen.

You know who’s who from either the color (I have a pink pen, so I am the pink chevron) or the name on the back of the chevron (see above). Half the time we wrote our name, the other half we didn’t (the pen color was enough to tell who was who).

 

Gameplay is dirt simple: the first player (with the plastic star) reads one of the cards aloud and everyone writes a number (secretly) on the back of their chevron. All questions have a numeric answer!! See a sample question above.

See Teresa writing her answer above.

Once you have your answer, players put their chevron face-down “somewhere” in the line of chevrons. If I am blue and I think my number is highest, I put my chevron (face-down) at the top. Basically, you are trying to figure out “Is my number less than or greater than my compatriots?”

Play proceeds around in order starting with the first player. When the play gets back to the first player, the first player has a chance to rearrange her chevron one last time: see Allison above (she’s the first player currently because she has the star) trying to decide if she wants to move her blue chevron!

You flip the tiles over (starting from the bottom), and for every one in order, you get a point! Above, we’d get 3 points since all three were in monotonically increasing order! Something that helped most people is that you think of the chevrons as “greater than” signs!

If, on the other hand, some were out out order, they get tossed to the side and not counted.  For exampple: above,  the 13 gets tossed, but we still get 2 points for the 21 and 36.

After 8 questions, players correlate their score to the score grid to see how they did! This is a cooperative game, so players are scoring together as a group.

Thoughts

We played this with three very different game groups: family gamers, casual gamers, and some hard-core gamers. We also played with 3 and 4 players mostly: even though the game says “4-8 players”, we had no problem playing with just 3 players.

The only problem playing with only three players was that the score sheet doesn’t cover that (so we used the 4 player level and just upgraded one level with our score for 3 players).

In general, the game went over pretty well in all three groups. Nobody loved the game, but everyone had fun playing (well, almost everyone). The game was easy to learn, easy to play, and was simple enough to play as long as desired. The first game tends to be the dictated 8 rounds to get a score, but after a while, you just keep playing and don’t keep score. I think that’s the sign of a good party game: you just keep playing because it’s fun!

One caveat is that one person didn’t like the game: they tend to have social anxiety, and even though this is a party game, it still put them “on the spot” with some questions that could be personal. For example, we found out that one friend had moved recently (“How many years have you lived in your home?”)!! So, some people who are very shy may not like this game.

Conclusion

So, Fun Facts comes from the same company that did our top cooperative party games: Just One and So Clover! I think Fun Facts would make our Top 10 Cooperative Party Games, but I don’t think it would make the Top 5. Generally, we all liked playing the game, and we’d play it again. It also worked in most groups (family, casual, hard-core) pretty well. Just One and So Clover! are better choices, but Fun Facts is a good cooperative party game that will get played again.