Review: Snapple Real Facts Game
Publisher: Pressman
Year: 2004
Tagline: The game with an exciting charades twist!

Cover is mostly yellow with orange and shows some Snapple tops on the front

how we met

There was this time in my life when I never knew Snapple Real Facts Game existed and this time when I knew it did. In the middle of those times, I was in a thrift shop and I looked down and saw the side of Snapple Real Facts Game.

I have probably only had a couple of Snapples in my life, but the brand was pervasive where I was growing up in the 90’s. The beverage was out of my price range during their heyday, so I probably didn’t have one until I was much older and able to afford such luxuries. But I knew immediately that I wanted to own Snapple Real Facts Game. And at thrift it was about the price of a Snapple beverage!

how it plays

Snapple Real Facts Game is a cross between trivia and charades, with an electronic Snapple bottle as your centerpiece. All players get divided into two teams.

The Snapple bottle is red and has a label and everything
I know, right?!

Players add 20 REAL FACT DISKS to the Snapple bottle. You have two rounds in front of you, and those same 20 disks will be in play throughout. The color is not important (unless it is, we’ll talk about that later), so just stuff the first 20 you find in there.

Choose a team to go first. In Round One, a player on that team will turn the Snapple bottle over to try and shake out a REAL FACT DISK. The inside of the bottle is supposed to spin and spit out a REAL FACT DISK when you turn it over, but that part of the bottle was intermittent for us. Turning the bottle over does let the Snapple bottle know you are in play, and the audible timer starts. That part was very consistent for us.

NOTE: The rules are very clear that you should not stick your fingers into the Snapple bottle. I’m not sure if that means the middle part often stops moving, or just that you should generally not stick your fingers into mysterious, battery-operated things. Either way, good advice.

The REAL FACT DISK will state a trivia fact with one or two missing words in it. The active player should read this trivia fact, and just note “blank” for the blank bits. Then they need to act out the missing parts of the fact.

As an example the REAL FACT DISK might say, “More [blank] are grown around the world than any other fruit.” The REAL FACT DISK shows that the missing word is grapes. So the active player needs to act out grapes to their fellow team.

Examples of the facts
Since our copy was mostly unpunched I just took a lazy photo to show you some facts, with a spelling error on Mr. Rogers to boot

If the team guesses correctly then the active player continues until the Snapple Bottle indicates that time has run out. Record the number of correct answers your team got, set those bottle tops aside, and if you have one that you were in the middle of that was not guessed, place it back in the Snapple bottle without saying what the answer was. Remember, only 20 REAL FACT DISKs are in play, and every, single one gets played.

Play continues in this way until there are no more REAL FACT DISKs left in the Snapple bottle. After all of these turns, add up the scores on the score sheet.

Now we come to Round Two. In Round Two, put all of the 20 REAL FACT DISKs back into the Snapple bottle. Additionally put five WILD DISKs into the Snapple bottle.

In Round Two, active players do not use words at all. They pull REAL FACT DISKs out of the Snapple bottle like normal, but instead of reading the trivia they just act out the missing word. Their fellow players guess the charade based on their memory of Round One.

If the active player chooses a WILD DISK instead of a REAL FACT DISK from Round One, they continue to act out the activity on the disk. However if the players on their team suspect that this charade is foreign and not from Round One they just shout, “Wild!” They do not need to guess the actual charade. If those players are correct then the active player selects another REAL FACT DISK out of the Snapple bottle and continues play until the Snapple bottle indicates time has run out.

If a team yells, “Wild!” and are incorrect then a point is deducted from their score.

Play continues this way until no disks remain in the Snapple bottle. At the end of both rounds, the team with the highest score wins Snapple Real Facts Game!

how it went

Okay, don’t quote me on this but Snapple Real Facts Game is actually kind of interesting for what it is. It’s certainly more interesting than I expected upon discovery that an electronic Snapple game exists.

The REAL FACT DISKs are a bitch to get out of the bottle. But that is true for everyone. The plastic part in the middle only spun intermittently for us, so we either got a bunch of disks falling out or just a soft breeze on our hands. All I know for sure is you need to shake the hell out of that bottle until anywhere from one to ten REAL FACT DISKs drop into your hand and then put all but one back into the bottle, never looking at any of them, as you attempt to continue play quickly.

So the bottle didn’t work great, but it looked and felt great. It’s fakin’ it til it makes it, and I admire that.

The copy I found at thrift was unpunched and lovely. I punched only enough REAL FACT DISKs to be able to play a full game, so 20 out of 500. But here’s where I got real dumb. I also punched 5 random WILD DISKs and did not pay attention to color. The result was that anyone paying attention to the color of what disk was drawn in Round Two could tell for certain, if the color was different, that this was a WILD DISK. Meh, whatever.

The back of an unpunched REAL FACT DISK sheet showing all yellow caps
Our 20 REAL FACT DISKs were yellow, and our Wilds were yellow, purple, pink..

The result of using the same 20 REAL FACT DISKs in Round One and Round Two is that players with good memories could easily blast through Round Two. We still had a few back and forths, because there is only so much time, but Round Two moves much more quickly than Round One.

I am not a big fan of trivia, so I feel myself drawn to trivia games that try to even the playing field a bit. Snapple Real Facts Game is a great example, as it combines trivia with charades and, in Round Two, memory. I have half a chance at trivia if you can read the fact aloud, and I only have to guess one word or phrase that you are acting out.

We generally had a great time with Snapple Real Facts Game, as we do with most party games. Our scoring was relatively even, but in Round Two Bill and I ran away with it. And we won Snapple Real Facts Game!

Scoring sheet has Snapple bottle tops as images
Even the scoring sheet is very much on theme

play or pass

Pass for me, but this game might be perfect for you. This is a fun trivia game, has a weird electronic component, and doesn’t take long to play a single game. Snapple Real Facts Game requires you to play 20 disks in a single game but provides 500 of them. That, my friends, is replayability.