Watching the pilot and episode 1 by their counting and it all feels capricious and arbitrary. The game feels like a gaudier and slower iteration of Bullseye, with a bad guy that the game could do without--if it's a race then the team should move as many spaces as they get answers and uncover a prize at each step. There would be no need to bank before stopping, the team would either play on and keep control or hang on to their prizes and send Joe upstairs to the other team.
Watched a couple of the Strike It Lucky/Barrymore eps over the weekend, and the differences between the two versions are stark. In the one episode I watched, from later in the run, Barrymore spent
12 minutes interviewing the teams. The game took about 13 or 14 minutes to play out, including the end game,
and there were
three teams on stage. Couples on his versions made decisions about keeping or banking prizes quickly, and Barrymore spent the entire show sprinting up and down stairs.
On ours, Garagiola spent lots of time reading the answers on the board, explaining the rules too often, waiting for the couples to deliberate, just a metric ton of downtime.
Didn't our version come first? Interesting that the pilot sketch showed the UK setup with three separated couples, but we ended up differently.
