Octopuses have three hearts. A day on Venus lasts longer than a year on Venus. Both sound like something a guy at a party made up, and both are true. Meanwhile plenty of fake facts sound perfectly reasonable, mostly because we heard them once, years ago, and never thought to check.
That gap is the whole game. Fact or Fiction shows you a statement, you decide whether it's real or made up, and then it tells you why. It's one of four free bonus modes that arrived in Trend Trivia® 1.6.0, alongside Spell It Out, Ballpark and Clue by Clue. There's nothing to unlock and no subscription involved. It's sitting on your home screen right under Solo Play.
How a round works
A round is 15 statements pulled from 13 topics: Animals, Nature, Space, Science, the Human Body, History, Geography, Food & Drink, Language, Inventions, Art & Music, Movies & TV, and Sports. Each one sits on a card with its topic chip at the top. Below the card are two buttons. Fiction is on the left and Fact is on the right.
There's no timer. You can stare at a statement about Napoleon's height for as long as you like. We left the clock out on purpose, because the fun of this one is actually thinking it through, and a countdown just turns it into a coin flip.
Tap your answer and the button fills green or red. A split second later a big FACT or FICTION stamp slams onto the card, the card's border picks up the right color, and the buttons are swapped out for a short explanation. You get that explanation whether you were right or wrong. That sounds like a small thing, but it's the part we cared about most. Plenty of true or false games just tell you that you missed and move on, which is exactly how people end up repeating the same myth with total confidence for twenty years.
Across the top of the screen, a row of 15 little segments fills in green or red as you go, so you always know how the round is shaping up. Tap Next statement when you're ready for the next one.
How scoring works
Every correct answer is worth 100 points. Streaks pay extra. Once you get three in a row, that third answer and every correct answer after it picks up a 50-point bonus, right up until you miss. The flame pill in the top corner shows your current run.
Here's what that looks like in practice. Say you get the first 8 right, miss the 9th, then get the last 6 right. The first two answers are worth 100 each, and answers 3 through 8 are worth 150 each, so that opening run is 1,100 points. The miss resets you. On the back half, the first two are 100 each again and the last four are 150 each, which adds another 800. That's 1,900 points for 14 out of 15. Getting all 15 in a row is worth 2,150, so the single miss cost you 250 even though it was only one question.
The XP you earn at the end is based on how many you got right, with the biggest jump saved for a perfect 15, and your daily streak multiplier applies on top of that. A round of Fact or Fiction also counts as playing for the day, so on a busy day it's a quick way to keep your streak going.
What the results screen tells you
When the round ends you get your total out of 15 and a gold verdict stamp. Fifteen is Flawless. Twelve or more is Sharp eye. Eight or more is Solid, four or more is Shaky, and anything below that is Fooled, which, to be fair, is kind of the point of the game.
Under that are three stats: how many you got right, your best streak, and Fictions caught, which is how many of the made-up statements you correctly called out of how many were in the round. That last one is the stat worth watching. Agreeing with a true statement is easy. Turning down a convincing fake is where rounds are won or lost.
Then comes the Worth remembering card. It lists every statement you missed, marked with whether it was fact or fiction, along with the explanation. Get them all and you'll see a Clean sweep card instead. If you only read one thing after a round, read this. It's the fastest way to stop falling for the same thing twice.
How the statements are written (and why that helps you)
Knowing a few of the rules we write by will make you a better player, so here they are.
- Every batch is exactly half true and half false. Your round of 15 is drawn from the whole pool, though, so you might get nine facts and six fictions. Don't try to balance your answers. Judge each one on its own.
- No giveaway words. You won't see "always," "never" or "only" doing the work. On a school test those words usually mean false. Here they're banned, so that trick won't save you.
- No negatives. Every statement says something is so, never that something isn't. You'll never have to untangle a double negative to figure out what you're agreeing to.
- Nothing is half true. We don't write statements that are mostly right with one shaky detail. Each one is cleanly true or cleanly false, so you're never arguing with the answer key.
- True ones are chosen to surprise you, false ones to fool you. A dull true statement or an obviously silly fake would be a wasted question.
Tips from playing a lot of it
Read every word. The subject is usually real. It's the number, the date or the named person where a fiction tends to hide.
Old myths are fair game. The sample card on the intro screen says goldfish have a memory span of about three seconds. It's fiction. Goldfish can remember things for months. If a "fact" is something everybody knows but nobody can source, be suspicious.
Weirdly specific usually means true. Nobody bothers to invent an oddly detailed fact about a beetle. When a statement is strange and specific, give it more benefit of the doubt than your gut wants to.
Slow down once the streak starts. After your third in a row, every answer is worth 150 instead of 100, and one miss drops you back to the start. There's no clock, so take the extra five seconds.
The Lie Detector badge
Fact or Fiction has its own badge. Catch 50 fictions, meaning you correctly tap Fiction on 50 made-up statements, and you unlock Lie Detector, worth 400 XP. It counts across every round you play, so it builds up over time. It's one of 60 badges in the app now.
Will you see repeats?
Not for a long while. The game keeps track of every statement you've answered. Statements you've never seen always come first. Once you've been through those, the ones you got wrong come back before the ones you got right, and only after that does anything cycle around. The pool is 700 statements right now, split evenly between fact and fiction, which works out to more than 45 rounds before you'd see a repeat. We're adding more.
If you quit partway through a round, it isn't scored, but the statements you already saw still count as seen.
Where to find it
Update to version 1.6.0 on iPhone or Android, open the app, and look for the Fact or Fiction tile in the four-tile grid under Solo Play. The intro screen walks through the rules once. After your first round, Play Again skips straight to the first statement.
Play Fact or Fiction
Free for everyone on iOS and Android. Update to Trend Trivia 1.6.0 and find it under Solo Play.
The other three free modes
- Spell It Out: guess the answer one letter at a time, with six bulbs to spare.
- Ballpark: slide a ruler to your best guess at a number. Close counts.
- Clue by Clue: who am I? The earlier you call it, the more it's worth.