For my archaeology project I thought it would be fun to make a Fact or Crap game. It’s supposed to be a fast-paced trivia game on everything we’ve learned so far in class about archaeology.
To set up the game you’ll shuffle the question cards from each category and place them with the vase of tokens in the middle of the players. Each player receives a ‘Fact’ and a ‘Crap’ answer card along with 8 tokens; the rest go in the vase.
To play the game the players take turns being the Reader in a clockwise direction. After the Reader has read the first question, the other players have to decide as fast as they can whether the answer is Fact or Crap. The players indicate their answer by putting either their ‘Fact’ or ‘Crap’ card face down. The Reader then determines which player was the first to put their answer card down. Once all of the answer cards are face down, the player who was first to answer turns over their card. If their answer is correct, they receive 2 tokens from the vase. The Reader will then ask everyone else to turn his or her answer cards over. All other players with the correct answer will receive 1 token. All players with the wrong answer (including the player who puts their Answer card down first) will have to put 1 token back in the vase. The Reader’s turn is then over and the question card is returned, face down, to the bottom of the question card pile.
There are two ways to win my game:
1. The game ends when all tokens from the vase are gone. Players then count up their tokens. The player with the most tokens is the winner, proving they know the most fact or crap about archaeology.
2. If all players but 1 have lost their tokens, the remaining player is the winner. If at any time during the game a player loses all of their tokens, he or she is out of the game.
When I was first planning this project, I was just going to make a bunch of question cards with random information that we’ve learned so far but once I started, I realized it would be better if the question cards were split up into different categories like John suggested. I made 6 different categories of questions: Archaeological Writings/Documents, People Associated With Archaeology and Their Important Discoveries/Theories, Various Techniques and Tools Used in the Field, Different Types of Archaeology, Artifacts Discovered, and Miscellaneous. I feel like archaeology is an underappreciated field right now and unless you take a class or go looking for information on the study; the average person doesn’t really know many specifics. I know John was suggesting I make categories or different levels of difficulty for the question cards and I found that the different categories worked better than levels of difficulty because when we practiced the game like Ethan suggested, most of my friends didn’t know a large majority of the questions so it was really hard to determine where to draw the line between the easy medium and hard levels. I was also going to make the question cards contain only the statement and the answer as to whether it was fact or crap. However when we were playing it, I decided to go back and include what made each ‘Crap’ statement false. The whole point of this project is to teach the public about archaeology and I realized that when the answer was ‘Crap’, most of my friends (and sometimes even I) had no clue as to why. So now when the statement turns out to be incorrect the Reader can inform the rest of the players what made it false so that they are still learning a true fact.
I also decided to use one of the vases my stepfather made in college to hold the tokens instead of just placing them in a pile. Erika commented on my original post with this idea along with a really cool idea for making the coins. The vase was made using methods like in the past such as wheel throwing, pinching, and coiling (this one was wheel thrown) so I thought that tied in well to the archaeology theme, unfortunately I am not very artistic or creative so I had to go with ordinary plastic coins.
Many people don’t know very much about archaeology and from the people I’ve talked to, some have misperceptions of it being a dull subject when in fact it can be very interesting. So I figured a trivia game would be an easy way to engage people in learning about the field because most people are open to playing games at least once even if they are pre-judging it as a dull topic. I also know from experience that sometimes people don’t like to play games that are difficult to understand or have a lot of rules to remember. This is why I chose to make Archaeology Fact or Crap; it’s competitive and you have to think and act quickly, but at the same time it’s super easy to play because all you have to do is decide if the statement is true or false.
I had a lot of fun with this project and I’m pleased with how the final game turned out, so hopefully others will find it a fun and informational game as well!