Florida Man Review

You may have heard of the Florida Man Meme: a collection of daily news articles detailing peculiar, and sometimes quite incomprehensible, activities of the people of Florida. Florida Man the card game aims to gamify this by asking players to guess which newspaper headline out of three presented on the card is not true. Figuring out the imposter allows players to progress along the victory point track, overlayed over the map of Florida – as if you are travelling across the state!

However, the track will be the last thing to worry about because the cards are completely engrossing. The ingenuity of the fake headlines is quite impressive because if events like ‘Florida Man arrested after asking deputies to test meth’s quality’ are true, how do you even begin to make things up? The threshold for the right balance of completely bizarre but still believable is very thin, and yet almost every card in the game hits it. You end up questioning every statement, no matter how outlandish it may seem. Sometimes, you pick a headline just because you hope with every fibre of your being that it didn’t happen, and in the most cases it ends up being a true event.

Yet even the funniest memes eventually become tired. Beyond reading headlines, there isn’t much to this trivia style game. It is a good laugh the first couple plays, but even with 600 different headlines, the game’s novelty runs out fast. Florida Man, however, does unequivocally prove that truth is indeed stranger than fiction! 

ALEXANDRA SONECHKINA

PLAY IT? Maybe

Designer: N/A

Publisher: JJACKD Games

Time: 15 minutes

Players: 2-10 

Ages: 17+

Price: £20

This article originally appeared in issue 58 of Tabletop Gaming. Pick up the latest issue of the UK's fastest-growing gaming magazine in print or digital here or subscribe to make sure you never miss another issue.

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