[quote name=\'nWo_Whammy\' date=\'Nov 4 2003, 02:01 AM\'] Cram is a game of memory rather than intelligence. If you have a photographic memory, but are stupid, you can still win.
Hard to explain, but it seems like I've seen quite a few dumb teams take it all on Lingo... Anyone else noticed that? [/quote]
Your observation about Cram brings to mind the difficulty of defining intelligence (and its opposite, stupidity). Mozart is routinely described as a genius. I would say the same of Mark Goodson, and most intelligence tests include some memorization and some language skills.
Probably the best definition we could use for "dumb" for the purpose of this thread is, lacking the skills that would normally be useful on the show in question. Then we could say that the shows we're looking to list rank low on the best-player-wins scale. (You could further refine this scale and look either at shows where the best player usually does win or shows where the rules give the advantage to the best player, regardless of whether it turns out that way.)
WoF is low, but far from the worst, because two of the necessary skills are (1) remembering which letters are vowels and which are consonants and (2) paying attention to the used-letter board or else remembering which letters were called. We have all seen plenty of people win who lacked one or both of these. In the latter case, contestants in the bonus round have called letters that they were already given.
Cram is, as you said, a memorization test. Other than adding in the physical tasks, the game itself is based solely on memorization, so I would put it high on the best-player-wins scale.
Most straight quizzers are high on the BPW scale. J! is probably the highest, not because it has the most difficult material, but because it has the fewest things to help weaker players.
If J! and 21 are straight quizzers, Password (pre-puzzle), Pyramid and Show-Offs could be called straight communication games. (For the unfamiliar, Show-Offs was a charade game.) They would rank high on the BPW scale. WLD, when it didn't have puzzles, would too. Adding the puzzles put it lower on the BPW scale, alongside Super Password/Password Plus and Body Language.
TPIR is actually high on the BPW scale: It is difficult to win much if you can't accurately guess prices. However, it loses points for the spin-off, because that has nothing to do with prices. (It is still an interesting game of intelligence, though! For years, off and on, I've been trying to figure out the precise point at which the first player should stop on his first spin.)
Then, you brought up Lingo. I would say that the skills necessary here are word recognition, obviously, and the ability to work with both the correct letters and the incorrect letters from previous guesses. If, as you believe, a lot of "stupid" people walk away, it's probably because there is nothing in place to penalize people who lack the second skill noted. (We've had a discussion on another thread as to whether there should be some sort of penalty.)
