Finally tried my world building/lore dump mechanism and it worked!

I wanted to get the players interested in the world without a lore dump and know about the principal npcs.
So I made a bunch of character sheets for the leaders of the largest factions and handed one each to the players. These sheets had goals and secrets and stuff to steal listed. We then played 3 rounds of the card game Asshole (you may know it as President). I said that whatever happens in the game with people trading positions I’d narrate as the news of the day.

It went so well!

• We got real drama out of the rounds we played. The player who portrayed a rebel leader lost badly 3 times so I ruled that the rebels were decimated recently.
• That drama provided background themes for the rest of the game.
• the players kept asking throughout the night about the NPCs they played.
• the players made plans based on the knowledge they had of those NPCs.

I used this in my Traveller game and the minigame accounted for them finding out news about the system they just jumped to.