Pricing game ideas, before they go in the recycling bin

[Adam Nedeff]

Found a document on the hard drive that I totally forgot about. Five years ago, I got hired as a page at CBS, with the idea that down the road, I'd be an indispensable part of the "Price is Right" staff and called upon to help develop pricing games.

Well, THAT ain't happening, so here's a proposal that I wrote five years ago for two new pricing games.

HIGH HAND
Two grocery items are displayed; one on a platform resembling a face card, the other on a platform resembling an ace. For each grocery item, three prices are displayed. For the face card grocery item, the prices are: #1) A correct price, hiding a face card, #2) A wrong price, close to the correct price, hiding 8, #3) A wrong price, further away from the correct price, hiding a 6. The contestant picks a price, receives the card behind it, and then plays for the ace. The ace item has three prices, arranged similarly, and hiding the ace, a 9, or a 7. The contestant picks a price. The goal is to come as close to 21 as possible. The house draws cards from a deck that the contestant has cut and must hit at 16 and everything below or stand at 17 and everything above. If the contestant’s hand defeats the house, the contestant wins a prize.

Variation: The game is played for two prizes. Instead of grocery products, the game is played using the ARPs of those two prizes.

SCRAMBLE
Played for a car (ideally a luxury car, as the game is intended to be somewhat difficult). Contestant is shown four small prizes. For each prize, a price is displayed. The contestant must determine if the price shown is correct or “scrambled” (digits in the price are correct, but out of order). Two of the small prizes have two-digit prices, two have three-digit prices.

Also displayed are the ten digits 0-9, out of order, on tiles on the board. The host announces that the correct price is among the digits and the digits are in the correct order, but not necessarily side-by-side (a la Split Decision). For every correct decision the contestant makes with the small prizes, a wrong digit disappears from view. After all decisions have been made, the contestant must remove however many digits are necessary for a five-digit price to remain. Having the correct price remain wins the car.

[BrandonFG]

I like High Hand...I think the one thing I would suggest is making a push/tie a win. I'm guessing a 21 is an automatic win?

[Adam Nedeff]

I like High Hand...I think the one thing I would suggest is making a push/tie a win. I'm guessing a 21 is an automatic win?

Yup.

[RobertSearcy]

I'm with BFG.....High Hand sounds like a good one (perhaps would have given them another use for the big Hit Me cards assuming they hadn't been destroyed/given away/auctioned off on eBay).  Seems to me like a simple game....more so than Hit Me.....Drew could explain it quickly, no having to multiply the products price by the display price by someone who doesn't do math that well.....and it also seems like it'd be a decently quick game, too.

[clemon79]

no having to multiply the products price by the display price by someone who doesn't do math that well...

At the risk of going full Odor here, I totally despise this knock on Hit Me. If you are in a position to have to multiply something complicated, it's because you failed to multiply by 10 and 1, and if 10 and 1 were too much of a challenge, I want to know how they dressed themselves without assistance. And if you are in the difficult situation of sitting on 14 or whatever and not sure if that box of Pop Tarts has a 7 or an 8 behind it...well, welcome to blackjack.

[TLEberle]

Thing I noticed: If you were to always pick the middle price (that is, the price with one higher and one lower than it) you can't do any worse than 17. You'll never get the "worst" card, and you might hit it bang on and get the ten or the face card. I doubt one in ten thousand contestants would pick up on that, or even if what I laid out is a viable strategy (the house gets to play after all) but there y'are. I do like the game as well as Scramble, but I'm really getting tired of the notion that Hit Me was just too hard. You don't ever have to do any multiplication; you can estimate what you think is the ten (and you don't even need the ten; a nine or an eight will do in a pinch) and if you bungle the ace then (gasp!) you actually have decisions to make.

I can see nuking Poker Game because it was a boring time-suck that had little to do with poker and barely any strategy other than risk aversion and comparing poker hands. Hit Me was a fun game that actually asked something of the contestants who played it. Is that so terrible, I ask you.

(Chris: you were only about 0.3 Odors: you remained calm, didn't provoke, inflame or swear, and managed to capably state your point without getting indignant about it. Good first effort but I think you can do better next time.)

[clemon79]

Hit Me was a fun game that actually asked something of the contestants who played it. Is that so terrible, I ask you.

This. I understand pulling the game from a television standpoint because people couldn't figure out how to play it well and that's bad TV, but I don't think that means the game was too hard; I think that means the brunt of the contestants were morons.

/that should raise me to at least a 0.4

[Fedya]

You don't ever have to do any multiplication; you can estimate what you think is the ten

It's only a problem if more then one of the displayed prices ends in 0.  Not that I watched TPIR too often, but contestants who couldn't do simple math was one thing about "Hit Me" that always drove me up a wall.

[BrandonFG]

I feel the same as the others above about Hit Me...even in middle or high school, I couldn't understand how contestants failed to grasp that a prize ending in "0" would have a 10 behind it. Granted, there were times where the producers would put a 5 in there, but you should still be able to put 2+2 together when you see "$7.90" and it's a .79 can of tuna, as opposed to a 1.58 bottle of salad dressing.

/But hey, bright lights and all I guess

[TLEberle]

/But hey, bright lights and all I guess

But here's the corollary to that:

Let's assume that the contestants don't know (or don't remember, was it ever explicitly stated that) for the cards <> Ace and Face that for each other number on the board, there's also a 10 minus X on it (so that if there's a three there's also a seven up there).  So the closer you get to 21 you start looking for the smaller cards.

Assuming a contestant doesn't know this, doesn't care or forgets, they're still playing blackjack. The contestant has probably heard of that or seen a deck of cards. It reminds me of the discussion about Check Game and why people were losing the game. I made the point that the game isn't hard to understand but instead that people are just bad at it.

You could randomly choose products to build a blackjack hand if you're uncomfortable with guessing what card is where; you still have to play against what the house draws. It might be difficult to explain and to lay out all of the intricacies of the game without stumbling but it isn't a hard game to play. (Frankly I don't want to hear about a game being hard to play while Pay The Rent continues to get airtime.)

[Thunder]

I never noticed that there were two matched sets of 10's on the board.

That makes the game slightly more impossible to lose because you win if you pick everything except the "X10" item. Not that anybody would consciously use that strategy...

[Mr. Armadillo]

Thing I noticed: If you were to always pick the middle price (that is, the price with one higher and one lower than it) you can't do any worse than 17. You'll never get the "worst" card, and you might hit it bang on and get the ten or the face card. I doubt one in ten thousand contestants would pick up on that, or even if what I laid out is a viable strategy (the house gets to play after all) but there y'are.

17 is actually a fairly lousy hand in blackjack.  Even if we assume the player wins all ties in this game, the house is going to beat a 17 roughly 57% of the time.

EDIT: Misread your strategy.  I missed the fact that you sometimes get better than 17.  I can run some more numbers later, but I'm still not convinced that 17 is a great fallback.

[TLEberle]

EDIT: Misread your strategy.  I missed the fact that you sometimes get better than 17.  I can run some more numbers later, but I'm still not convinced that 17 is a great fallback.

You made half the point I was about to: you have a 75% chance of improving on that, and 1-in-4 of winning the game outright.

I think I'd make a few tweaks to the consolation cards but it sounds like a fun game and a quick grocery game, something I think they need more of. (They nuked Penny Ante; perhaps the quintessential quick grocery game. Herp de derp.)

[MSTieScott]

I disagree with High Hand being considered a quick game. Yes, there are only two grocery plugs to go through. But look at all of the things that have to happen:

- The host explains that the game is like blackjack. The host explains that the contestant must choose the closest price, which contains a 10. The next-closest contains a 8, the farthest contains a 6.
- The contestant chooses a price, card is revealed, actual price revealed if necessary.
- The host has to re-explain the cards hidden behind the prices on the second item.
- The contestant chooses a price, card is revealed (actual price revealed if necessary), total is announced.
- At some point, the contestant has to cut the deck. Cards are dealt to the house, added, additional cards drawn as necessary.

There aren't many decisions for the contestant to make, but there's a lot of business. By the time all of those things have occurred, the game takes as long as Grocery Game or Now or Then. That's not a judgment on the game -- I'm just pointing out that it's not as quick as it first appears.

[TLEberle]

- The host explains that the game is like blackjack. The host explains that the contestant must choose the closest price, which contains a 10. The next-closest contains a 8, the farthest contains a 6.

One of the things I thought of: what if the host doesn't reveal what the consolation cards are?

"If you pick the actual price you'll get a ten. The farther away from the actual price, the worse your card will be. If you tell me the price of both items exactly you'll have 21 and win the (prize.) If not we hope your two cards are better than the hand we deal for the house."

I don't think that you need to tell what the runner-up cards are, and I don't think they have to be the same each time, except that the second best price has to have a better card than the worst of the three.