Veritasium, a YouTube science channel with nearly 20 million subscribers and over 40 million monthly views, launched “Elements of Truth” on Kickstarter on November 11. The science trivia game marks creator Derek Muller’s return to the crowdfunding platform exactly 10 years after his first product launch.

Game Mechanics Target Broad Audience

“Elements of Truth” features a bidding mechanic in which players wager on their confidence in their answers. Each card provides both factual information and explanatory context about the underlying scientific principles.

“We wanted to make sure that the questions offered a challenge to everyone playing the game,” Casper Mebius, Editorial Lead, said in a press release. The gameplay design aims to engage participants regardless of their level of scientific expertise.

Global playtesting sessions with fans influence question formats, gameplay mechanics, and expansion topics covering engineering breakthroughs, historical inventions, and cosmological concepts.

Crowdfunding Strategy Emphasizes Community Input

Veritasium chose Kickstarter, despite having an established audience base. The campaign serves three specific functions: collecting question submissions from backers for future expansion packs, offering limited collector editions, and integrating community feedback into product development.

“We’ve always had a close relationship with our audience. They provide feedback, suggest video ideas, and have supported many of our new efforts in the past,” said Mebius. “We’ve playtested it with the audience, and now we’re inviting everyone to submit questions directly.”

The channel previously launched Snatoms, a molecular model kit, on Kickstarter in 2015.

Product Tiers and Distribution

The Kickstarter campaign offers three product levels. Backers receive voting rights on future expansions and access to community-selected questions. The premium “Einsteinium” edition includes a wooden box and 800 questions across multiple categories.

Shipping covers the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with additional regions under review. Delivery to customers is scheduled for August 2026, incorporating all feedback and community contributions into the final version.

Muller positions tabletop gaming as complementary to video content. The format enables slower-paced learning, face-to-face discussion, and interactive mechanics testing intuition and memory recall – capabilities distinct from YouTube’s video platform.

“Science is full of surprising ideas that challenge our intuitions,” Muller said. “We wanted to capture that emotional ‘aha’ moment in a tabletop format.”

Muller’s channel has accumulated more than 2.7 billion views since its 2011 launch. The creator holds a PhD in physics from the University of Sydney, where his thesis examined the design of effective multimedia for physics education. His academic background in video-based learning informs his content strategy, which aims to address viewer misconceptions and encourage critical thinking about scientific concepts. Veritasium’s video content has also generated appearances on television documentaries, including Catalyst and The Why Guy.

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