Tall Tales

Tall Tales is part trivia game and part storytelling contest, built around three legends: Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Roswell alien. It runs on three kinds of cards. Tall Tale cards ask multiple-choice questions about strange-but-real phenomena, answered in secret and flipped at once. Zinger cards are fact-or-fiction trivia. Topper cards hand you a topic and dare you to out-lie everyone at the table — votes earn points, and a bluffer is open to challenge. First to ten points wins. Four or more players, ages ten and up, thirty to forty-five minutes. The box billed it as “The Game of Legends, Humdingers, and Creative One-Upmanship.”

It was the first game Stalefish Labs ever shipped — February 2003, a year after I started the company. By then I’d been through the whole arc once with Inc.: design it, fund it, get it printed, sell it out of the trunk before the holidays. So this time I knew what I was signing up for. Fox 5 News dubbed it “the cell phone of games” at Toy Fair that year, a line I’ve never fully decoded but have always chosen to read as a compliment. It’s out of print now; Stalefish keeps the full entry and what’s left of the original run. This is just the vault marker, so the games thread reads in order.