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The Unbelievable Truth

Updated: Dec 26, 2019

If you're in the UK and listen regularly to BBC Radio 4, you'll be familiar with the radio comedy panel show The Unbelievable Truth. In the show, chaired by comedian David Mitchell, panellists take turns to deliver short lectures on various topics. Almost everything they say is untrue but, within the untruths and nonsense the speakers are trying to smuggle through three actual facts.

That's exactly reproduced in this game from Ginger Fox (Hacche Retail). The game comprises a set of lecturer cards with the three truths printed in bold. The lecturer takes a card and delivers the lecture. The other players race to be the first to ring the push-bell (supplied with the game) if they think they've spotted a fact. If they are correct, the bell-ringer takes a token giving them a point. There are negative point for an incorrect challenge. The lecturer earns a point for every truth smuggled through unnoticed.

Also in the box is a set of cards with five unrelated statements of fact or fiction. These are used for a quick-fire round. On these, the number of true or untrue statements is varied from card to card, so players can't simply 'calculate' the veracity of the last statement.

This all makes for a fast, fun party game or filler. You can choose to play as many rounds as you like, but this is a game that will typically take around 15 minutes. There's no real upper limit for the number of players, except that everyone needs to be reasonably close to the bell: you'll find that there's often a mad rush of two or three people darting their hand over to hit the bell – by no means always correctly.


There are enough cards in the box for you to get your money's worth out of this game before you come back to cards you've seen before. We just had a slight problem with a few cards that had paragraphs where the bold type was scattered within text that was obvious nonsense. The idea here is that the person ringing the bell has not merely to say whether a statement is true but has to untangle the true part from the fiction.

If you like the radio show, you'll enjoy The Unbelievable Truth game. If you don't know the show, try to find it online (for example, on BBC iPlayer), then you'll want to go out and buy this game.


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