Richard Garfield may be best known for a little game he made in 1993 called ‘Magic: The Gathering’, but that greatly undersells the incredible range of games he’s designed on over the years. Wargamer caught up with him to learn about Half Truth: Second Guess, a new party board game that’s just gone live on Kickstarter.
Co-designed with Jeopardy! host and champion Ken Jennings, Half Truth: Second Guess is a trivia game that Garfield says is “designed to be more inviting to broad groups of players, some of whom might not feel comfortable with trivia”. From talking to him, it’s obvious a lot of thought has gone into how to make the best board game possible while negotiating the fact that some people simply know more or less trivia.
“My favorite times playing Trivial Pursuit, or games like it, was when the quiet person who had no chance of winning knew something no one else did”, Garfield says. “I wanted to make a game that shined the spotlight on those players more consistently”, he adds.
“Each question has six answers provided – half are true and half are not”, Garfield explains. You get a point for each question that you answer, and “players who are confident can press their luck by answering more, but if they get a single answer wrong, they earn nothing for the round!” This gives overconfident players an opportunity to blow up their own score by getting greedy, so they can’t race too far ahead.
There’s an art to writing questions so that players who don’t know much about a topic have ways to make an educated guess. “You can do that by giving some answers that can be eliminated using other knowledge”, Garfield explains. A question might ask you to identify Pokėmon, with three breeds of dog as the incorrect answers. “That allows players who know Pokėmon to do well, or players who recognize the negative theme and know dogs”.
Some questions have obviously right and wrong answers, so that players don’t ever feel lost at sea even when the topics are varied. “If there is an obvious answer, the challenge to the players will be, who will risk losing easy points trying to get a second, or even third answer?”
Half Truth: Second Guess is a sequel of sorts to Half Truth, which was released in 2020. The pandemic was a good time for board games in general, but “for party games it was pretty bad”. Though he’s sanguine about how it was received, he does think it was a little overlooked: “Half Truth is in my top five games of my [own] design”, he says.
While Second Guess and Half Truth are cross-compatible, Garfield is very confident that the new edition is much better. “I am proud of the quality of Half Truth”, he says, but “by the time we did Second Guess, we were making consistently better questions”. Second Guess also has new game modes including a fast-playing variant, a team variant, and a variant with more players; always a good thing for party board games.
Half Truth: Second Guess is available on Kickstarter now, with a basic copy costing $20 plus postage.
Though Garfield has made plenty of trading card games after Magic the Gathering, Half Truth isn’t a total outlier for being a party game – in 2016 he released ‘Hive Mind’. “It is a game where you score more for answering the same as other players”, he explains. It has “oodles of questions, but you can use the same one multiple times because different groups will answer them differently”. It sees a lot of play at Garfield family gatherings: “you can play without the game once you get the hang of making good questions”, he says.
If you’re interested in party games that are a little more raucous, check out our guide to the best party games for adults. And if you want something that’s a lot more raucous, our guide to the best drinking games has you covered!
Source: Wargamer
