Ultra PRO has completed its previously announced purchase of Playroom Entertainment. The game publisher joins other recent acquisitions of Ultra PRO: Jolly Roger, TableTopics, and the publishing rights to Stone Blade Entertainment’s titles.

Playroom will continue with a distinct brand and catalog, and Dan Rowen will remain at its head. The transaction, though, is allowing the company to move ahead with a number of projects, including the next release, Fake News or Not?. Hitting retail in just a few weeks at $20, Fake News or Not? (renamed from Fake News or Real News?) has players trying to guess which among a series of weird stories or historical events is actually true.

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If anything, the political climate is worse than when I first covered post-truth games in February, and apparently the game market has noticed.

Breaking Games’ Fake News ($25) is now available direct from the company. In it, players try to outdo each other writing outrageous headlines for a selection of image, phrase, and audience cards.

Available June 1st is Fake News/Real News ($14) from License-2-Play. This one takes politics on more directly. Included are cards with caricatures of people in the current administration and cards with 300 outrageous quotes, some of which are real and some of which are fake. Each round, players try to guess whether a selected quote is real and who said it.

Playroom Entertainment has in the works a similarly named Fake News or Real News? by Reinhard Staupe. Modeled on the designer’s True Stories, the game presents players with a series of weird but true news stories, each represented by a question and multiple-choice answers. The goal of the players, of course, it to correctly guess which of the strange answers correctly completes the story.

#AlternativeFacts ($10) from UltraPRO (not to be confused with Frog God Games’ Alternative Facts, which I mentioned last time) has players contributing noun, verb, and adjective cards to a jointly developed headline. When the second card with a Hot Button icon is added, the player who’s card had the highest Clickbait Strength wins the round.

One more, on Kickstarter, is also titled Fake News. Publisher Zag describes it as word Poker. That is, each round the current judge (dealer) puts out two word cards. Then the other players combine those cards with word cards from their own hands to produce, they hope, the best headline.

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The current political climate in the United States hasn’t escaped the notice of game publishers. Breaking Games recently applied for a trademark on the term “fake news” with regard to board and card games. No details on game-play are available yet, just a Fake News Game website to sign up for a mailing list. Partnering with Breaking Games, however, is Cards Against Humanity, so I wouldn’t expect anything easy-going.

Another game in the making is Alternative Facts from Frog God Games.

You win [Opinion Points] by assembling sets of matching Alternative Fact cards from your hand. A matching set is called a “Trick” in most card games, but we don’t like that word. It sounds deceptive. Instead, we call a matching set of Alternative Fact cards a “Truth.” A valid Truth can be made up of 3 or more identical cards — after all, the more you repeat something, the truer it is.

This one’s about half funded on Kickstarter but…

We began accumulating awards for Alternative Facts before even writing it, and expect to generate many more awards if necessary.

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