Are There Games to Help Learn About Fallacies?

Yes, but they're usually boring, dry or too hard to understand.

Take a look at some as the most popular resources on the web.

Online Tools and Websites

Your Logical Fallacy Is is the most well-known. It includes 24 fallacy cards with definitions and examples. You can read these online, but there is no option to use them offline.

The Fallacy Files is more academic. If you're not a nerd, forget about it!

Classroom Activities

Fallacy Bingo games are good for learning the names but not for really understanding what they are or why we use them.

Spot the Fallacy debates are used in some schools where students argue fallacies. It's a game but it has no structure, scoring, or replayability.

Video Content

Crash Course Philosophy on YouTube are pretty good. They're excellent for introducing the fallacies but after you watch viewing them, there isn't much else to do.

Books

The Fallacy Detective by Nathaniel Bluedorn and Hans Bluedorn is a good resource but very dry and has no stickiness. You quickly want to put it down as fast as you picked it up.

The Tuttle Twins Guide to Logical Fallacies makes learning about fallacies more accessible for young readers through storytelling but feels more like a lesson than a fun adventure.

The Amazing Dr. Ransom's Bestiary of Adorable Fallacies by Douglas Wilson and N. D. Wilson is charming and beautifully illustrated. It's great to look at but you may struggle to remember anything once you've put it down.

The Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Almossawi is beautifully illustrated and genuinely charming. It covers only nineteen fallacies though, reads in about twenty minutes and doesn't give you much to do once you've finished it. Great for sparking curiosity. Not so great for making it stick.

Existing Card Games

There are some fallacy card games out there but there mostly designed for philosophy departments. They're heavy on the text, not great to look at, and come with a hefty price tag. Maybe for this reason, no one has ever heard of them.

The one exception worth mentioning is Debunked - probably the most well-known fallacy card game available. Players say it's decent for learning the names of fallacies but that's about as far as it goes. Reviewers note that you don't even need to read the cards to play, which tells you everything you need to know about how much actual learning is happening. It's also far more complex than it needs to be - with so many fallacies applicable to any given situation, pinpointing the right one becomes frustrating rather than fun. Dull was the word most players used. Not a great sign for a game that's supposed to make critical thinking enjoyable.

That's what makes Guess the Fallacy? so extraordinary. We're super easy to understand, fun to look at and a genuinely fun game designed for families and anyone aged 10 and up. Most fallacy games fall into one of two failure modes: they're either too academic to be fun, or they're too gamified to be truly useful. That's not us.

Guess the Fallacy? makes fallacies, fun, meaningful and unforgettable. The need to invent your own scenario demands genuine understanding rather than just knowing the names. Add peer pressure in a group setting and you've got the perfect social tension that makes learning stick.

Activities You Can Do Without Any Materials

If you want to learn fallacies without a game, here are a few activities you can do at any time.

Spot the Fallacy - when looking at advertisements or listening to politicians, see if you can spot Appeals to Emotion, the Bandwagon Effect, or Appeals to Authority. See our Guess the Fallacy? cards to help spot the fallacies.

Read the comments section on any controversial topic and see if you can spot the You Too Fallacy, Straw Man, or Ad Hominem Attack. We bet it won't take long. 

Family dinner debates are also a great opportunity. See how your family members - and even you - use fallacies to drive your point across. 

Ready to play? See our Guess the Fallacy? game - designed for the dinner table, not the classroom.

New to fallacies? Start with What Are the Most Common Logical Fallacies? to get up to speed.