Half Truth, the party game where half the answers are always right, you just need to know which half. Half Truth has a simple concept, every round you reveal a card from a deck of questions, it will have six answers, three are right and three are wrong. Players secretly bid upto 3 answer chips selecting their chosen answers. All of your answers must be right or you get nothing. Players reveal their answers, those who submitted only right answers move forward on the score track.
Here’s where it gets tricky and I have explained the scoring at least a dozen times... every time we play… and more than once during a single round, but here goes nothing. A die is rolled at the start of the round showing how far players will move on the round track if all their answers are correct. It is not per correct answer, so why would you submit more than one answer? Well for every additional correct answer you submit you’ll score 1 additional point. Points are different to the round track… So if you get all three answers correct you will move forward on the round track the number of spaces showing on the die AND you will score 2 points.
It shouldn’t be that hard to get but every round I find myself repeating the same information. Perhaps it’s just my play group but I can imagine if I were trying to get Half Truth played at a party and everyone had had a few drinks this scoring would be beyond comprehension. The game also suffers from some annoyingly America centric questions, like “States won by Donald Trump in the 2016 elections” or “Codenames used by the Secret Service.”
So it’s a yanky favouring, overly thinky, party, trivia game with an incomprehensible scoring system? So does it have any redeeming features? Well, yes, it’s clever. The dice mechanic that makes the scoring so infuriating to explain is also the thing that is genius in this game. You see when a question is only worth 1 move forward on the round track you might as well submit more answers, go for the extra points, push your luck. But when getting all the answers right is worth 4 move forward, perhaps it’s better to just submit one you’re certain of.
And when you think the dice is done giving it tosses you another curveball and instead of looking for the right answer you’re now looking for the lies. Now the game really shifts gear because you were fairly sure you knew one correct answer but that leaves you with five you were uncertain about and you need to pick at least one that is wrong. And the “wrong” answers always feel like they could be right, making you doubt yourself and second and even third guess yourself.
Half Truth then is a trivia game of pushing your luck, you’ve always got a 50/50 chance of being right. It’s too cerebral for a party game, too complex for a drinking game, but for after dinner entertainment at a dinner party with your intellectual peers it's a perfect fit.
On the third day of Christmas, Santa gave to me, 3 correct answers to a quiz question!