After watching lots of Cullen Blockbusters and thinking, "Didn't those letters just recently show up in that same configuration?" I began to track the patterns of letters used in the main game. And sure enough, the show uses the same boards over and over again.
It wasn't until this most recent Buzzr run, when the boards started playing in alphabetical order, that I finally noticed that they can easily be identified by the letter in the upper left-hand corner. Exactly one board has an A in that position, exactly one board has a B in that position, et cetera. There appear to be twenty boards, A through T... although in the episodes Buzzr has aired over the past few months, board B has only shown up during the opening and board R hasn't appeared at all.
I remember years ago seeing a clip online where they played a couple of X questions, but I can't find it anymore and Buzzr hasn't aired that episode. Does anybody know what the board layout was when there was an X hexagon? I'm curious whether that was its own special board (board R?) or whether they took an existing board and replaced a different letter with an X.
While I'm here overanalyzing a game show from nearly 40 years ago, here are other statistics about the 19 boards I've seen:
• The boards do not all appear at the same frequency. For whatever reason, board M shows up the most.
• The letters Q, Y, and Z appear on one board apiece.
• U is excluded from six boards. J and V are each excluded from eight boards. K is excluded from nine boards.
• Of the non-super-rare letters, I is excluded the most, being absent from ten boards. When it does appear, it's always along the perimeter, and often in one of the "squished" hexagons that are less likely to be called. As a result, it's surprisingly rare to hear an I question on this show.
