It’s one of Toronto’s best-kept secrets no more. Fact? Or Fiction?, a party game that challenges would-be detectives to out-think museum curators, is starting to spread to cities outside of Canada and around the world. Invented by the Royal Ontario Museum, it’s must-play popularity has helped it become an important fund-raiser for research and that, combined with the excitement shared in recent years by players across Facebook and Twitter, has ignited the interest of other museums, galleries, and institutions eager to run their own detective parties.

 

Daily Planet's Dan Riskin and Ziya Tong host the evening.  

The concept is an ingenious one. At night when the museum is closed, a main hall is transformed with a collection of fifteen rare and never-before-seen artifacts, each carefully plucked from deep within the museum archives. Spanning the many disciplines of the museum itself, it becomes a perplexing tour of preserved animal parts, insidious instruments, mysterious minerals, tenuous textiles, and overlooked oddities from our own human past.

Is this a formation found in sedimentary rock or a fossilized piece of animal dung, once the prized possesion of a dung beetle? 

Could this be a cauliflower mushroom that once grew around the roots of a tree or the nest of paper wasps, found after a fire in Brazil?

Each of these items is watched over by a pair of curators engaged in a passionate, insistent, and energetic debate as to just what the item is. Players are asked to visit each curator couple, listen to their arguments, examine the specimen, and work out the truth. One of the debating curators is selling the right information, the other is lying through their teeth.

After running the game for fifteen years, the ROM is still waiting for a challenger to walk into their hall and solve all the items. Some have come oh so very close, but no one has swept the room yet, a testament to one basic fact about the game - the curators who run it are very good indeed.

Who to trust? One of these curators will tell you the truth about the yellow baubles in their hands, the other will lead you astray 

They tell me they have as much fun as the players themselves and spend months if not the whole year planning and working out their devious strategies, their acting roles, and choosing items that are strangely ambiguous in nature.

Each year the person who solves the most items is awarded an extravagant getaway. This year it was a $20,000 expedition to Antarctica, which is more than enough motivation for people to try to beat the contest. Even bragging rights alone are enough to attract an eclectic mix of science buffs, academics, and eccentric geeks to the role of artifact detective.

Long, thoughtful stares a common in the game. Is this a turtle shell or a piece of laquered wood from Chinese furniture? 

Plant or animal? Does this jar hold the flower spikes of a Lemon Bottlebrush shrub or a Sea Fir Hydroid, a marine creature that feeds on tiny shrimp? 

Some cram their heads with natural history, others read up on the psychology of lying. Players will try to stare curators into breaking, others prefer to get right up close and study each specimen to the nose, as if a micro-sized detail will give away the ruse. Those who have been attending the party for years have learned to simply go with their gut.

This year’s event was delivered by celebrity geeks Ziya Tong and Dan Riskin, the hosts of Daily Planet on our own network’s Discovery Canada channel. Jubilant and jocular, they guided the room through the rules and later through the answers with playful zeal.

The diabolical nature of the game means that when the answers are read out, it’s met by an outcry, an exasperated realization from many in the room that they had been duped and both Dan and Ziya played to this well.

 

Careful observation. Is this a caltrop, a weapon thrown to the ground for soldiers to step on in 331 BC or a game piece for an early version of "Jacks"? 

This curator would have you believe the metal tool in her hands is from Victorian dentistry, her partner says it was used by the Romans for writing on beeswax. 

There is a trick to Fact? Or Fiction? and it’s one that I think has kept it alive all these years. Being an educational institution the ROM created a rule, asking their curators not to make up any information. Every story told is based on a real object, on real facts. It’s just that one curator is describing the object that’s actually sitting on the table before them while the other is describing an object still tucked away in the depths of the museum’s archives. There’s deception at work, but neither curator is lying, so nothing to catch them up on.

An odd pairing, a Red-Legged Cormorant rests next to a Gulper Eel in it's casing. Which one is better known as Eurypharynx Pelecanoides? 

Party detectives keep track of their conclusions using special cards punched by the curators.  

A detective at the party myself, I’ve smelled the venom of a tail-whip scorpion, heaved mountain leather, and tingled my fingers with eel skin, all in the hands-on pursuit of the truth. The thought that this game might spread to museums in exotic locales, that this detective party could become an international one, is a perfect one. All devious plots should aim to conquer the world, naturally.