A game for 2–4 players, where you have to answer trivia questions on hundreds of cards…? Trivial Pursuit, surely, that game that more or less defined the 1980s’ gaming scene, and which is still going strong? Nope, wrong answer. It’s the upcoming Elements of Truth, to be published by Veritasium in the second half of 2026.

I confess I’d not heard of Veritasium before seeing this project, but it appears to be primarily a YouTube channel packed with entertaining and educational science and engineering videos, and I’m truly in danger of squandering my afternoon just watching video after video.

Element of Truth has been ‘designed to help you understand how confident you are in what you know. Each question asks you to think like a scientist: weigh the evidence, assess your confidence in your reasoning, and test what you know.’ Those questions come in four forms:

• True or false, such as, ‘Sharks have existed for longer than the rings of Saturn, true or false?’
• More or less, e.g., ‘Does Earth’s atmosphere have more or less water than all its rivers combined?’
• Multiple choice, such as, ‘Which has most bones? A… B… C… D…’
• Number line, e.g., ‘If Earth were the size of a basketball, how thick would the atmosphere be in mm?’

(Personally, I’m not sure they needed to bother splitting the first two into separate categories.)

To play, each player gets ten voting chips and a ‘whiteboard’ (to scribble the numeric answers). One player reads the first question, and everyone else writes or places a chip in a space on the player mat indicating their chosen answer. After everyone’s made their choice, the answer is revealed; chips for right (or closest, in the case of the numeric questions) answers are moved into the scoring area; chips for wrong answers are discarded.

The interesting thing about the chips is their numeric value, representing how confident you are in your answer—i.e., you’d play a high value chip if you were sure your answer is correct and a low value one if you’re pretty much guessing.

After scoring, the role of question asker moves to the next person, and a new round starts.

The game ends after ten questions, when each player’s score is the sum of the chips in the scoring area (hence the need to utilize your confidence values wisely).

The base game contains 200 questions (compared to Trivial Pursuit’s 1,000 cards, each with multiple questions), but there will be six expansions of 100 cards each, bringing the total to 800. Unfortunately, as the project currently stands, the complete set of expansions is available only via the deluxe pledge, and $100 feels like a bit too much for a game like this.

Five of the expansion packs are already fixed (engineering questions, physics, astronomy, technology and ‘general’), but the sixth is being created from submissions by the Veritasium-watching public. In fact, the Kickstarter project page includes: ‘We’ve built this so far with involvement from all of you, from playtesting to deciding on expansion packs. Now we’re launching on Kickstarter because we want to give everyone a say in what makes it into the final game.’ Though, somehow all the submitting of questions and voting is happening on the ‘socials’ rather than on Kickstarter, so I’m not quite sure how that all fits together.

Final Words

Elements of Truth is a pretty straightforward and quick game, with the sorts of questions that some people will love and some absolutely hate, but they will make you think.

Or swear. Or possibly both. Unfortunately, the questions are sufficiently offbeat that I feel they’ll tend to stick in the mind, so it might not take many plays before people start to remember the answers for many of them. Perhaps we can hope that many more expansion packs will be made available.

I think it’s more interesting than Trivial Pursuit but do have to acknowledge that, for me anyway, that bar isn’t very high. It’s also much, much more expensive than TP!

Having said that, at time of writing, the Kickstarter project is 4× funded, with more than 1,500 backers, so clearly a good few folk are interested in it.

About the author

When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.