I don’t go into trivia games with high expectations. In the past, I’ve refrained from purchasing them myself, instead borrowing from the library or ending up with one here and there as gifts. Trivia games are one-trick ponies, and more often than not that one trick is exhausted as soon as you’ve gone through the whole deck. Sure, you could tuck the box away and bring it out in a year to see if you’ve sufficiently forgotten enough factoids via the passage of time (very fun and cool), but how much do I wanna do that?
Outfox the Fox is different. Not because it reinvents trivia or includes a bajillion cards– I don’t think it does either of those things, though it does have a lot of cards. It’s different because it’s more than a trivia game. If, like my family, you aren’t particularly good at trivia, Outfox the Fox hardly feels like trivia night at all.
Think Family Feud but Steve Harvey has stopped mugging at the camera about the inappropriate answers you ought-not-be-saying and instead actively tries to get his contestants to lose. Also, each of you is the misdirecting Steve Harvey a couple times.
The gameplay is easy to explain. Each round, one of you is the question-reader. The question-reader looks at three possible questions to pose the rest of the table. These questions vary widely from opinion poll responses to objective rankings, but they follow the same format: a list of five things in order. Maybe it’s “Language with the most native speakers” or “Things that are the most annoying”– usually trivia, but sometimes Family Feud.
The question-reader looks at this list of five items, given in a random order, with a spot reserved for their fake answer. They rattle off these items and the other players have two minutes to deduce the correct order, one through five. However, the reader also inserted their own fake answer, called the Fox, which they hope will end up highly ranked.
Immediately this creates more diverse gameplay than the usual trivia experience. We aren’t only working together or looking at the smart person and twiddling our thumbs. Twice per game, your mind gets to do a very different but equally satisfying thing: trick your friends. And when you are on team “The People” trying to figure out the correct order, you have to sniff out this Fox and avoid being tricked.
Sure, the Toyota Corolla is a very popular car. But maybe that’s just a misconception that I had, and she knew I had that thought because she had it also, and therefore it’s the Fox. Second-guessing yourself and making mistakes is a classic trivia experience, but OutFox the Fox gamifies it. You aren’t only trying to remember a Wikipedia page or a Youtube video you watched five years ago, though that’s certainly there for Jeopardy people. You’re also trying to decide if your friend would have put that ridiculous answer in there or if it’s somehow real.
The other thing I tend to dislike about mass market trivia games is how disposable the mechanics and balance feel. Jeff Grisenthwaite’s design, on the contrary, is considered. There are just enough bits for the game to feel significant without too many for it to feel arbitrary. For example: when trying to put the list in the correct order, you have some wiggle room between 2-3 and 4-5. Thank you. Without that extra massaging, getting some of these questions correct would feel more like a chore. That extra bit of generosity goes a long way.
The players also can place their meeples on an answer to “double down” and maybe grab a few extra points. I like that this double down can’t be placed on the Fox, which could’ve been potentially backbreaking when a player already receives zero points for the round if their fake answer is discovered. Again, little touches done right.
These nudges back and forth mean the scores are usually close by the end, even if one player knows more, I dunno, basketball statistics. The game assumes, as the question-reader, you ought to pick a question that you know more about than anyone at the table. That way, your fox can be most convincing. In my plays, we found it just as good to pick a question nobody will know anything about. Something silly, something random. This is when Outfox the Fox teeters from a trivia deception game to a goofy party game, which might not be for everyone.
The most knowledgeable player doesn’t necessarily have an extra edge, especially since they’ll spend most of the game lending their knowledge to the other players. If they pick a cool question and come up with a good fake, they could still be outperformed by someone picking a silly and/or extremely difficult question and getting a point lead that way. Trivia nuts beware, you might lose to goofiness. In fact, you probably will, at least at the skill level of my table.
Another minor issue I had: the rules for six plus players add an unnecessarily complex wrinkle. I appreciate that everyone still gets to make up the Fox twice (by having two readers per round, working in tandem to come up with one fake), but I would much rather keep it simple and have everyone do that role alone once. It can be hard for quieter players to get their voice heard amidst six other people, also. Three to five is probably the sweet spot.
At those lower player counts, this game ticks along smoothly, people-pleasing and smile-inducing. The included timer creates a frantic rush to start getting items in order, but also ensures the game doesn’t overstay its welcome. There’s no bogging-down moment of “Oh we’ve already played with that card, draw a new one,” because used cards have their own place in the box. Little decisions to keep things pacey really start to add up. I even like that the question-reader isn’t responsible for writing down the list items– it’s a minor detail but it gives the proceedings a bit more structure and, yeah, makes things go a little quicker. Additionally, with another player writing down the list, the fox role feels less like a game-master facilitating and more like they are the villain to be conquered that round.
Does that make any sense? Does it matter to anyone other than me? I don’t know, but it’s another little detail that I can imagine being done worse in another game. Outfox the Fox gets the details right, executes a novel concept, and lets you do some friendly deception without having to be a masterful liar or a knife-in-back betrayer.
Leave a comment