Our mission – (accepting was not negotiable) was to come up with a concept for a board game and develop it to prototype stage. Easy right? Yes – if you are Ben and grew up in a family playing a lot of games, with a competitive mother who didn’t like to lose and other siblings all vying for the position of winner, a healthy amount of lying and cheating, and voila, you have the recipe for our game ‘That’s Bullshit’! Based loosely around Trivial Pursuit, it is a game where the winner is the player with the best general knowledge coupled with the ability to lie convincingly. Ben, one of the team working on this crazy concept, declared at our last meeting, “I love my trivia, but I love bullshiting even more!”. Perfect for our game.
Trivial Pursuit was developed on December 15 1979, by a couple of Canadian guys after they couldn’t find all the pieces for their Scrabble board and decided to make their own game. By 2004, Chris Haney and Scott Abbott, (the games designers) had become like board game rock stars with an astounding 88 million games selling worldwide prompting its listing in the “Games Hall of Fame”. Trivial Pursuit made the pursuit of knowledge popular and accessible to the whole family. The success of the game depended upon all the players having their own special areas of expertise thus igniting the competitive tensions between family members. For example, dad might be stronger at the geography questions, whilst mum excelled at art and english and the kids at pop culture.
Trivial Bullshit draws upon the successful formula of Trivial Pursuit but mixes it up by adding the concept of lying in order to win points. This references family arguments in competitive games over what is the correct answer, however the player whose turn it is has to guess which of the other player’s is telling the truth. Unless of course, they know the correct answer and they then win the point.
In this week’s seminar, we made a mockup of That’s Bullshit and we are happy to report that the game played out well with whoppers circulating wildly. This was balanced out with all players strongly arguing their points raising the decibels in the classroom quite considerably.
Welcome to the Machine 