Hardest Game Show To Understand

[WarioBarker]

Ha! It's a shame Wolpert never tried the bloopers-as-format-for-questions idea again. Or that nobody swiped it.

PAX's Balderdash bonus game and NBC's Singing Bee (at least the board game rendition of it) say "Yo."

[clemon79]

Ha! It's a shame Wolpert never tried the bloopers-as-format-for-questions idea again. Or that nobody swiped it.

Know how I know you've never seen Balderdash?

[Jimmy Owen]

Loved seeing the Solari boards turn, but in order to get a chance at the Super Jackpot! the planets had to align just the right way.

[alfonzos]

BTB '76 gets my prize for the most convoluted explantion about how the gameboard works. Treasure Isle gets the runner-up position.

[GameShowFan]

It also took me awhile to figure out the 90s version of It Takes Two's bonus round. I could never wrap my head around Dick's explanation of being within 20% (or whatever the percentage was)...

As the guy who fed those ranges to Dick before he revealed a win or loss... the range for a win varied on the answer that we came up with (either in my research or for the stunt in question). Pain. In. The. Ass.

Had we gotten a second series, we had something different in mind, but we never got that chance.

'Brian

[TLEberle]

Had we gotten a second series, we had something different in mind, but we never got that chance.

I don't think "be within a given range" is that bad, but I've been playing heaps of Wits and Wagers in the last month, and that game is all about questions like "how many employees does Google have?", plus I get along just fine with numbers, so the idea of being within 25% up or down of the correct answer isn't hard to get.

[Matt Ottinger]

I don't think "be within a given range" is that bad, but I've been playing heaps of Wits and Wagers in the last month, and that game is all about questions like "how many employees does Google have?", plus I get along just fine with numbers, so the idea of being within 25% up or down of the correct answer isn't hard to get.

While I typically don't like game shows simplifying themselves to appeal to a larger, dumber crowd, this sort of percentage-range thing is simply too mathy-weird for an average viewer.  Especially, IIRC, in the case of It Takes Two, where the ranges weren't necessarily consistent from show to show.  People are confused by Final Jeopardy wagering strategies, and that's just addition and subtraction.

[WilliamPorygon]

I remember watching Clark's It Takes Two after school back in the day, and while I enjoyed the front game, I agree that the bonus round was completely baffling.  I eventually sort of figured out the "within a percentage of the right answer" idea they were going for, but the lack of explanation the show gave made it far more confusing than it should have been.  All they ever said was "If the answer is between X and Y you win" with no clue whatsoever as to how they came up with those numbers, and the fact that sometimes the X in that statement would be zero only made it feel more like they were just pulling numbers out of their asses until it happened enough times for me to eventually figure out it meant the contestants severely lowballed the answer.

(Semi-related:  I recall years ago, on the long defunct MSN board that was the forerunner to Golden-Road.net, during a rather long losing streak for the Check-Out game, I suggested they could normalize the difficulty by making the difference you had to be within 10% instead of a flat amount like $2.  I ended up coming to the conclusion that, even properly explained, that would be too confusing for "Joe Plinko" to understand.)

[CeleTheRef]

initially The Price Is Right was perceived as this in Italy .  it took a few episodes to become successful.

[parliboy]

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I remember watching Clark's It Takes Two after school back in the day, and while I enjoyed the front game, I agree that the bonus round was completely baffling.  I eventually sort of figured out the "within a percentage of the right answer" idea they were going for, but the lack of explanation the show gave made it far more confusing than it should have been.  All they ever said was "If the answer is between X and Y you win" with no clue whatsoever as to how they came up with those numbers, and the fact that sometimes the X in that statement would be zero only made it feel more like they were just pulling numbers out of their asses until it happened enough times for me to eventually figure out it meant the contestants severely lowballed the answer.

Two problems clashed here: 1) they showed the episodes out of order and 2) Clark ran the show as if it had been on the air awhile. Things that would normally be explained in greater detail in early airings of the show weren't.

(Semi-related:  I recall years ago, on the long defunct MSN board that was the forerunner to Golden-Road.net, during a rather long losing streak for the Check-Out game, I suggested they could normalize the difficulty by making the difference you had to be within 10% instead of a flat amount like $2.  I ended up coming to the conclusion that, even properly explained, that would be too confusing for "Joe Plinko" to understand.)

Also, normalizing the difficulty means they cannot control the difficulty, which means they cannot exert proper budget controls when that game is played. Consider games with normalized difficulty, like, say, Secret X. The only things they can do for that game are a) find things at surprising MSRP and then swerve the contestant, and b) place the X at the bottom more often, since historically that was the least likely location.

[WhammyPower]

Even today, BBC's new game show Breakaway was hard to understand after the rules explanation... once it got going, it all came together.

/Anybody gonna make it available on torrents and/or YouTube?

[Johnissoevil]

One I will admit I didn't understand when I was a kid was the rule for winning the IUFB on TPIR.  I used to be baffled by how a contestant would win and get on stage to play a pricing game when they didn't even bid the exact price on an item.  I then figured out at around 7 years old that it was the person who came closest without going over, something Bob had CLEARLY said right before bidding on the first IUFB of the show.