Don’t Fall For It is a trivia game with a tumbling tower twist

Trivia games come in all shapes and sizes these days. There’s absolutely no denying that it’s the easiest way to get into a living room board game collection, or under the tree at Christmas. Don’t Fall For It combines trivia with a fun, decoy system and a clever ‘pulling swords’ tower system that keeps the tension and interest high.

Don’t Fall For It is the latest trivia effort from Big Potato Games, but instead of having it as a simple case of guessing the right answer from a read question card, it’s instead a turn-taking process of elimination where you pick from a selection of provided answers. If you do pick an incorrect answer then you have to pull a coloured stick from an assembled tower, but there are cubes in the tower and if they tumble out then you have to keep them as negative points.

In hindsight, that’s actually quite a complicated thing to explain for a trivia game. So, I’ll go through Don’t Fall For It‘s set-up, as it’s actually quite a simple game once you’ve got everything in place.

The most complex element, which is also the most entertaining (and core) element, is the tower. The tower comes flat, is folded out into a rectangle and then stood over a slightly-too-small ramp. The reason the ramp is a different shape is so it’s not guaranteed that every one of the negative points will fall out even when dropped. After that colour sticks are slid through their matching slots, and cubes are put into the lidded tower. This creates a tower that has a bunch of negative cubes somewhere near the top, but with their drop to the bottom blocked by the sticks, and their path and location hidden by the tower itself.

In many ways, Don’t Fall For It‘s tower feels like it could be a game on its own, and it might well have been the originating point for it, with trivia inserted in as a way to give structure to the tower. That said, the process of elimination element to the trivia — which is played out by removing cylinders from a ‘topic card’ to reveal if the answers are correct (at which point you just pass it to the other team) or incorrect and, if so, which stick you remove from the tower.

Don’t Fall For It feels like a fully, complete game that cleverly executes on two fronts: Trivia, with it’s ‘reveal’ and multiple choice, and the tumble tower. I do think that it suffers some of the issues of other Trivia titles, in that it’s hard to balance questions for a family environment — which will continue to frustrate trivia games forever more — and that the box is a bit large considering the nature of the tower… but it’s a fun, twist on a classic format, and that’s more than enough to make it stand out.

Don’t Fall For It is available now from Zatu Games.