The fun of Trigger, the element that made us laugh every time we played, is in the revelation that our left hands and right hands are stupid. I mean bag of hammers, running-with-scissors, couple-shoes-short-of-a-pair stoopid. This is, after all, a game that presents true or false statements like: “You are related to at least one person at this table” and “You are married.”
In order to answer these outrageously obtuse questions, players race to be the first to slap a foam target (think of a round drink coaster) with their left or right hand. Left hand for False and right hand for True. Right is right. Left is false. How hard can it be?
Trouble is, when everyone is watching everyone else, it is really easy to mimic what someone else is about to do. The statement above about being related to a person at the table is a good example. I was looking at my daughter across the table and to my credit, I put out my right hand for True; however, before I could whack the target, I switched hands because one of the people next to me was putting out their left hand. So when we sorted the answers, I was stuck with this embarrassing FALSE answer to a question that is so obvious that it would be used to determine if I had suffered a concussion.
Trigger is Major Fun in a tiny round can. It comes with 60 cards, a foam target, and a concise set of rules. Each card is one of six colors on the front (orange, blue, red, violet, black, and green) and has six color coded questions on the back. Players receive 5 cards and one player starts as the referee. The referee asks a question. The other players race to slap the target with the correct hand. Once you slap your hand down, you cannot move it. This results in a pile of hands covering the target which the referee must sort out. The player with the first correct answer (the correct hand at the bottom) wins and receives the card. That player becomes the referee and reads a question that matches the color of the card they just won. The player with the first wrong answer (the lowest wrong hand) loses a card.
The game ends when one contestant runs out of cards.
You could determine the winner by who has the most cards. You could determine the winner by who made the fewest embarrassing blunders. Or you could just embrace the absurdities of human psychology that drive us to make responses we know are wrong just because we are under pressure and looking at other people. We could have kept score but we were having too much fun.
Trigger was created by Julien Sentis. It is © 2011 by Blue Orange.