Lil Wayne and the M&Ms – A Fun Facts Review

Look, Kasper Lapp’s Fun Facts is nominated for the prestigious 2023 Spiel Des Jahres, but it’s not going to win. That doesn’t matter. A loss doesn’t diminish this absolutely fantastic release. Similar to Repos Productions’ previous breakout hit, Just One, this title slots into a very rare category of cooperative party game. It also happens to appeal to a picky group of people I’m forced to call family. That may be more impressive than winning the Spiel.

I’m going to attempt something a little different for this one. Let’s do this in a more traditional way. I’m going to pretend to be one of those other reviewers and break this thing up into two sections.

HOW TO PLAY

You get a dry erase marker and a plastic chevron. Someone picks up a card and reads a question aloud: “On a scale of 1-100, how competitive are you?”

Everyone writes their number on one side of their placard, and their name on the other. Then, the first player tosses their board onto the table with the answer face down. Going clockwise, each participant slots theirs either above or below another. You can sandwich between two previous answers, even.

The goal is to create a hierarchy with the highest value at the top. So, if you are one of those sweaty types and rate yourself 100 on the competitive scale, you’re placing your chevron above all others.

Once we go around and everyone’s placed, then we flip from the bottom up, tossing out any answers which fall below the previous flipped result. This question and answer process is repeated eight times.

That’s the whole of it.

THE REVIEW

This game is lovely. It’s dead simple. You could learn how to play and even rattle off a few questions in the time it takes to setup most other games.

That speed alone isn’t terribly important for most people reading this. Here’s the thing, I’m not likely to play this game with most of you. Or, more accurately, people like you. Perhaps at a convention or as a late night closer, but it really vibrates at full intensity with a group of people that don’t care about the difference between modern or traditional games. The kind of people that would benefit intensely from the headway in contemporary game design but aren’t likely to be interested in the titles that feature those advancements.

Fun Facts eliminates any excuse to say no. You toss someone a board and a marker and ask them a question. Everyone can come up with an answer as every answer is correct. It’s trivia about yourself. The cooperative format really sells it. It’s another thrashed barrier as no one needs to feel like they will play poorly and lose or get trounced by someone else for reasons outside their control.

From a cogitative perspective, this could be dull. But to the game’s credit, many of the questions are interesting. They make you pause and take a moment for consideration. They instill some introspection. Sometimes, they inspire a little bit of discussion in search of clarity. Usually this serves as a feature, although I suppose rarely it could be seen as a bug. It doesn’t occur often enough to really bother.

Then the second interesting moment is when you slide your board into the stack. It inspires this small trice where you have to quickly bounce your own perspective off other’s. It’s an occasion of external awareness and a tidbit of beauty when thoughtfully examining the mind of those you love.

And the reveal can be both frustrating and hilarious. Sometimes it can be touching. Anecdotes are necessary.

My cousin, she of 26 years, would spend 100,000 United States dollars to have Lil Wayne perform a private show in her apartment. She’s not the financial wizard of the family.

My mom thinks she could fit 200 M&Ms in her mouth. Ludicrous.

My brother would spend 10 years away from everyone on an all-expenses paid island trip if he had the option. The next highest person said a month. I think I saw my mom’s heart crack in real-time. “You must not like us much” she jokingly-but-not-jokingly jabbed.

These are the types of fun facts which come back around. You know I brought up the 10-year island trip multiple times since then.

One of the really special aspects of board games is that they bring us closer together. They form ligaments of personal connection in the space between us. It’s really a wonderful thing when it happens.

I have many such inside jokes or stories with my regular game group. Maybe someday I will tell you about how “clockwise” became “Coconuts order”, or why we call Chaos in the Old World “Casanova”. But those types of things don’t tend to happen when playing traditional games with friends or family outside the hobby. It’s why I’d much rather play more contemporary and thoughtful designs, titles such as Wits & Wagers, Just One, and now Fun Facts.

Despite my clear appreciation of this new release, I must admit it’s not nearly as innovative as Just One. It feels a little less revelatory in the wake of that design. I think that detail, along with my observation that it’s much better with non-hobbyists, is the primary reason it’s received a relatively ho-hum response from games media.

It’s also easy to slip into the criticism that it’s more of an activity than a game. This is primarily due to the scoring feeling a little stapled on and not an organic feature of the process. Nevertheless, it’s a game and it’s a good one.

There’s also an unavoidable deficiency in that the experience is much limper with strangers. You have no frame of reference when attempting to determine ranking and it’s entirely guesswork. You also don’t likely care too much about the knowledge gained from particularly revealing answers. None of those layers hit. For this reason, the game’s not going to succeed at larger meetups with rotating members. That’s simply not it’s natural environment.

But it does bring us closer to those we care about. I know this. It has happened to me. And then they started asking that beautiful question.

“Hey, did you bring that one game? The game about ‘facts’?”

Of course I did.

 

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