A science YouTuber with over 19 million subscribers has launched their own board game on Kickstarter. Veritasium is aiming to raise $37,000 for a trivia board game named after the channel's tagline: Elements of Truth.
According to the Kickstarter, which kicked off on November 12, Elements of Truth challenges you to think like a scientist. "Weigh the evidence, assess your confidence in your reasoning, and test what you know," says the description. I guess 'test what you know' sounded more scientific than 'make wild bets' because the gimmick here is you can stake numbered tokens to win points based on how confident you are in your answer.
What I like most about this idea is that you can only use each token once, so you really have to think carefully - not just about each question, but also about which token to spend on them. It adds an extra level of complexity to the formula. Now it's not just 'do you know the answer?' it's 'okay, you think you know the answer, but what are the odds you're misremembering?'
The concept seems straightforward but effective, although I do worry it would intensify the problem encountered in most trivia games: they don't really work once you've gone through all the questions once.
According to the Kickstarter page, you play through 10 questions in each game, and the base box of Elements of Truth has only 200, which might give it a limited shelf life. However, Veritasium does have a solution in the form of additional booster packs, covering different topics from Astronomy to Engineering.
There are five booster packs in total, and altogether they can add 600 new questions to the game, so we're assuming that each one has around 120 questions. Check out the scientific reasoning on us!
Veritasium will also be building a community expansion pack by taking submissions and running polls on social media, and this will come to every Kickstarter backer.
The base pledge of $39 gets you the game (plus community questions) while a more extravagant $99 pledge bags you a deluxe version with all five booster packs.
Assuming the Kickstarter is successful (and it's already 30% of the way there) Elements of Truth will launch by September 2026.
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