The Line - seen on GSN 12/23

[BillCullen1]

So did anybody see this? Simple enough format. Answer eight true or false questions correctly and you win money. I thought it was okay.

[Matt Ottinger]

I'm afraid I didn't think much of it.  Since there's so little to the game, they have to draw that "delayed reveal" nonsense out to almost satirical levels.  Players were pretty uniformly dim, but the questions were so easy that the jackpot never really got into interesting levels.  I don't think anybody won more than $20,000, which means that they never went more than ten players without a win.  And of course it was so heavily edited that you never got the sense of any real continuing drama. 

It's a cute stunt to play games on location, and that might be enough to keep it going, but it's not something I'll watch.

[Marc412]

Well, if they ever come to the Philly area, I'll definitely give it a go.

[TLEberle]

What's the format? Is there more to it than the quiz questions and jackpot at the end? How large is the jackpot, and by what interval does it grow when somebody fails to claim it?

[Marc412]

Each player in turn will get a chance to enter the vault and answer up to eight true/false questions.   Each right answer adds $250 to a jackpot that starts at zero and grows until someone gets all 8 right in a row.  One wrong answer sends the player out with nothing but fond memories and whatever swag they hand out, and the next player in line gets a shot.

While you're waiting in line, you could get called on to win a prize or play a game that'll either send you to the front of the line or the back.

(Edited to clarify that the pot rolls over until someone wins it and the losers don't exactly leave empty-handed.)

[BrandonFG]

What's the difficulty level of the questions? I know you can only do so much with true/false, but is it at least common knowledge?

[Marc412]

Yeah, it's random general knowledge and pop culture.  Most of the material isn't difficult, but like I said, it only takes one mistake to send you home.

[SuperMatch93]

Does the difficulty increase as you get closer to eight, or is the material consistent?

Doesn't seem all that compelling as a game show, but I'd still go if it came to Chicago.

[TLEberle]

So in essence it's a touring version of Break the Bank, with extra stuff thrown in.

To Matt's question: would you have preferred lots of people winning a few hundred dollars, or one person taking down an enormous jackpot? Because you really can't have those two things in the same instance.

[Matt Ottinger]

Does the difficulty increase as you get closer to eight, or is the material consistent?

Consistent.  According to the narrator, the questions are generated randomly, and there wasn't anything I saw that suggested otherwise. 

To Matt's question: would you have preferred lots of people winning a few hundred dollars, or one person taking down an enormous jackpot? Because you really can't have those two things in the same instance.

Well, the minimum anybody could win is $2,000, which I guess isn't bad for eight easy questions on a game show that came to you, though some people stood in line upwards of twelve hours for that privilege.   Still, because of the editing, it seems as though we didn't see nearly all the winners.  I got the impression that low-scoring winners may have been edited out in favor of colorful contestants and (by their standards) larger jackpots.  To your specific question, I guess I'd prefer to see some larger jackpots, especially since we're only going to see a fraction of game play anyway.

[TLEberle]

Forgive me if these sound silly; I don't get the channel and didn't see it. If you answer two questions right do you win $500 or $0? If the jackpot resets to zero with a new challenger how would it get any higher than the $2,000 for eight right at $250 each?

[Joe Mello]

Forgive me if these sound silly; I don't get the channel and didn't see it. If you answer two questions right do you win $500 or $0? If the jackpot resets to zero with a new challenger how would it get any higher than the $2,000 for eight right at $250 each?

I read it as the pot going up $250 for each right answer, winner (ie 8 in a row) taking it all. It doesn't reset for each challenger.

[TLEberle]

So there is at least the possibility of a large-ish payday for Eight Right. And there's no way to get out with a lesser payday; it's everything or squat?

[Flerbert419]

That's right, it's everything at the time or nothing.

The most interesting part for me was how long some people were willing to wait in The Line just to have a shot at anywhere from $2,000 up to about $16,000 - from the first person getting in line 2 hours early to some having to wait for 12+ hours.  They also weren't clear if everybody in the line had a chance to play or was it a set time that the vault wouldn't be open for any other players, since it never seemed to get dark outside.

At the end of the two hours the claim was made that they gave away over $150k at this one location.

[Matt Ottinger]

Yeah, if a player misses, the player is gone but the bank stays.  Somebody eventually takes the whole pot by getting eight right, and only then does the bank reset to zero.  But since you have to get eight right to win, a brand new player would still win two grand, the value of his own eight questions.

It's a little like the escalating payouts on Super Password and other shows of that type.  To a large degree, the amount you win isn't really dependent on your own abilities, but rather on what happened (or failed to happen) before you got there.