Have you ever played Wordle? Of course you have, everyone has! But imagine how that puzzle changes if, somewhere in the feedback step, the game was allowed to lie to you. Not constantly, not chaotically, but just enough misinformation to make you doubt everything you think you know. That’s the core idea sitting at the centre of Fiction by Peter C. Hayward, published by AllPlay in 2023, and it’s a clever hook that immediately reframes the very familiar experience of Wordle into something a little more mischievous.

The version I’ve been playing is Fiction: Banned Books, which draws its words from excerpts of historically challenged or banned literature. It’s a nice bit of flavour, at least on paper, and gives the game a slightly literary framing, even if that theme doesn’t always carry through in a meaningful way during play. At its heart, though, Fiction is a deduction word game where one player takes on the role of the “Lie-brarian,” while everyone else works together to uncover the hidden five-letter word.

If you’ve played Wordle, the structure will feel immediately familiar. The Lie-brarian secretly writes down a five-letter word and provides the group with a starting letter. From there, the other players begin making guesses, submitting five-letter words in an attempt to narrow down the possibilities. After each guess, the Lie-brarian provides feedback on every letter, whether it’s not in the word, in the word but in the wrong position, or correctly placed. Just like you’d expect. The twist in Fiction is that for every single guess, the Lie-brarian must lie exactly once.

That single rule does a surprising amount of heavy lifting. It takes what would otherwise be a straightforward deduction puzzle that already works perfectly as an app, and injects just enough uncertainty to keep everyone second-guessing themselves. As the guessers, you might feel like you’re closing in on the solution, only to realize that one piece of information doesn’t quite fit. Maybe you’ve been banking on an C being somewhere in the word, but then suddenly you realize that it’s impossible. Maybe a pattern you were building toward starts to unravel.

The guessers aren’t completely at the mercy of the Lie-brarian, though. Each team has access to a small pool of “Fact or Fiction” tokens, which they can use at any time to challenge a specific piece of feedback from the most recent guess. Point to a letter, spend a token, and the Lie-brarian must reveal whether that particular clue was truthful or the required lie. It’s a powerful tool, but a limited one, and deciding when to use it becomes a key part of the puzzle. Sometimes you’re looking to confirm a strong suspicion; other times you’re just trying to find any solid ground to build from.

Both sides of the table have their own challenges to overcome. As the Lie-brarian, you’re trying to be consistent in your deception. You need to mislead the group just enough to slow them down, but not so much that your lies contradict each other and you give the whole plot away. There’s a subtle art to choosing which letter to falsify. Do you obscure something important, or do you plant a small, believable seed that sends the group in the wrong direction? At the same time, you have to keep track of every lie you’ve told, making sure that your future responses contradict don’t accidentally expose the truth.

And then there’s the simple challenge of remembering to lie exactly once per guess. It sounds straightforward, but in practice it’s surprisingly easy to slip up, either by forgetting to lie at all or by accidentally lying twice in a single guess. Either mistake can throw off the structure of the game, though I can’t blame the game for my own mental inadequacies. It’s a small mental load, but it’s always there, and it’s caused a couple resets when the Lie-brarian realizes their folly.

On the other side of the table, the guessers can quickly find themselves tied in knots. Without any constraints, it’s easy for a group to fall into long discussions, analyzing every possibility, debating every letter, and trying to untangle which piece of information might be the lie. That’s where the inclusion of a timer really helps. By putting a limit on how long players can deliberate, the game forces decisions to be made before everything is perfectly understood. Those slightly rushed guesses often generate more useful information than perfectly optimized ones would, and they keep the pace moving in a way that the game really benefits from.

The one area where Fiction feels a little underproofed is its theme, at least in this Banned Books version. While I appreciate the inclusion of classic works like 1984 and Animal Farm, and there’s a certain charm in reading the excerpts as the Lie-brarian, the actual gameplay doesn’t meaningfully connect to that theme. In practice, the words could just as easily come from a generic list, and the experience wouldn’t change at all. It’s not a problem, exactly, but it does make the theme feel more like a light wrapper than something integral to the design.

As a group Wordle-style experience, though, Fiction works really well. The idea of introducing a single lie into each round is simple, elegant, and surprisingly effective at transforming the very familiar puzzle into something more interactive. It creates moments of doubt, sparks discussion, and gives both sides of the table meaningful decisions to make. And once you’ve gotten a hang of the core game, there are asymmetric player powers for both the Lie-brarian and the guessers that adds a bit more texture and chaos to the experience.

That said, I’m not entirely convinced it’s the word game I’d reach for most often. Even within Peter C. Hayward’s own catalogue, I find myself more drawn to Things in Rings, which scratches a similar itch in a way that resonates more with me. But if you’re looking for a one-versus-many deduction game with a clever twist on a familiar formula, Fiction is easy to recommend. It takes something you already understand and adds just enough uncertainty to make it feel new again.