Which would you say is the best board game version of "Wheel of Fortune", and why would you say so?
Well, running all down the line...the first MB editions (Woolery Era) were a little odd. They offered a set of letters and blank puzzleboard - nice for keeping the game fresh forever with your own puzzles, but not so nice for set up time. Shopping is neat, I guess, but it's not a very sophisticated game.
The Pressman editions were nice, but the puzzleboard was a little clunky. Every edition I saw from my birth to now has had bad tracking on the doors, and you couldn't quite see the lines under where the letters were. That was the biggest flaw. The wheel was nice, and the light border, but...ehh.
The Deluxe version had the same puzzleboard, but the wheel more than made up for it, with all the wedges up to $5,000 and just a purely cool design. It makes the game much more fun to play at home.
Tyco had a terrible wheel, but defeated everybody with its great, great puzzleboard. The top was pretty solid, containing a defined slot for a category, and good flip-down doors for letters. Underneath that lied a used letter board set, where upon sliding a door aside, you would see which slots contained that letter, or just a blank space. This was by far the best one, and most functional too. Pressman included a wipe-off letterboard that was pretty decent, but this just eliminated the booklet on top of it.
Parker Brothers released a version that had a mini-wheel, but with only eight spaces (1 was bankrupt, 1 was LAT, and 1 Free Spin), it was kind of lame. Puzzleboard was decent and stuff, and the stack of tear-off letterboards neat, but overall a bland game.
The latest releases are just rehashes of Pressman's versions. They have the same wheel, only with the modern Free Spin graphic and $5000 replacing the yellow $100 slot. Take that for what you will.
I'd say, for the best game, get Deluxe Wheel. The cool prop, and changing wheel make it
play the best at home. If they recreate that, and take the puzzleboard from the Tyco edition, it'd truly rule.
(Sorry for rambling...I won't post for two more days now
-Jason