Facts in Five
Facts in Five, a bookcase game, is one of my favorite games. The premise is this: there are five rounds in which you have five letters and five specific classes/categories of things to come up with for those letters. You have a minute timer (it’s actually like three minutes or something) running down. Scoring depends quadratically on the number of answers you have for each letter and for each category. Each player chooses letters and categories.
For example, one round might have “Diseases/Sicknesses – Human,” “Outlaws – Class Only,” “Fictional Characters – From a book,” “Botanical Objects – Edible,” and “Sport Forms – Team Sport.” Five letters might be T, E, J, O, and *. (* is a wild card.) This is an actual list of categories and letters that I played with recently, and below is the card I ended up with at the end of the time:
| Diseases / Sicknesses | Outlaws | Fictional Characters | Botanical Objects | Sport Forms | |
| Human | From a Book | Edible | Team Sport | ||
| T | Tay-Sachs | Tuber | Tennis | ||
| E | Ebola | Eggplant | |||
| J | Jaundice | Jill (Jack &) | |||
| O | Onion | ||||
| * | SARS | Clyde Barrow | Huck Finn | Potato | Basketball |
Anyway, the game is awesome. But that’s not what I’m posting about.
Crude Oils
So in the game, there is often a wild-card in which you can pick your own class and category entirely. My mom always picks “crude oils” because that’s her line of work and we clearly know nothing about it. Over the years, I’ve learned Qua Iboe and WTI, and my brother learned Dubai. But other than Q, W, and D, we were sunk. Until I memorized one crude oil for each letter. Unfortunately for me, my plan backfired in that my mom didn’t get a wild-card. But nonetheless, here are my crude oils:
Azeri, Brent, Cossack, Dubai, Ekofisk, Forties, Girassol, Hibernia, Iran, Jasmine, Kirkuk, Labuan, Mars, Njord, Oseberg, Poseidon, Qua Iboe, Ras Gas, Saharan, Triton, Urals, Vasconia, WTI, Xikomba, Yemen, and Zarz.
Memorize that list, and the next time you play Facts in Five, you’ll have a wild card that no one will be able to beat!
The timer is for FIVE minutes, thus the name Facts in FIVE.
And of course you realize that now that you’ve memorized crude oils A-Z I’ll never pick that category again. I mean, I know a lot of crude names, there are in fact over 1600 named grades of crude oil in the world today. But do I have an A-Z memorization at my fingertips? NO.
But don’t worry! I’ll think of another, equally obscure category before we play again.