Do-it-yourself Card Sharks home game

[alfonzos]

You will need 10 ten-sided dice, a screen to put between two players, two decks of standard playing cards with different backs, familiarity with the rules of the game.

The person who has control of the "question" gets six dice while the other gets four dice. Both players roll their dice behind their side of the screen so the other player can not see what numbers were rolled. The player who rolled the six dice dice guesses what the number will be when all ten dice are totalled. The other player guesses whether that guess should be "higher" or "lower." The values of the dice are totalled and the winner gets control of the cards.

Play proceeds as per the standard game.

Perhaps a variant where a player who has revealed more cards gets more dice. For example: the red player has the freeze bar at the fourth card whereas the blue player has the freeze bar on the second card. The red player rolls seven dice getting a two dice advantage for every extra card revealed.

Do you think this is a worthy game? Opinions please.

[Matt Ottinger]

It certainly works, and if all you're worried about is the sheer mechanics of playing the game, it's as good a way as any of getting right to the cards.  Still, part of the charm of the actual game is the human element of turning the questions around in your head and figuring out the survey questions.  The Endless game has a perfectly serviceable book of those, and it's at least as easy to find as ten-sided dice would be.

This is similar to efforts to convert TPIR to home play.  There are those (including some earlier manufacturers) who would be perfectly content to generate "prices" randomly and have the pricing games be purely strategy and chance, but the game isn't the same unless you're actually trying to figure out real prices.

[sshuffield70]

Personally, I wouldn't use the dice element.  Matt is right in that part of the charm of the game are the human interest questions.  I don't use the Endless book.  I use another web source for my version.  And it's worked out very well for me.

In case anyone is wondering, I can't reveal the source since the game is active.

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'sshuffield70\' date=\'Nov 1 2005, 12:48 PM\']Personally, I wouldn't use the dice element.  Matt is right in that part of the charm of the game are the human interest questions.  I don't use the Endless book.  I use another web source for my version.  And it's worked out very well for me.

In case anyone is wondering, I can't reveal the source since the game is active.

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Here's my problem with the dice system: When it's my turn to guess the sum, I'm simply going to sum up the dice I've rolled and add 4.5 (5.5 if the OP is counting the 0's as 10's) for each of the four dice I don't know about. Or I might just guess a flat 45 or 55. If you take out the "human nature" element, then my aim is to make the higher/lower thing as close to a 50/50 shot as I can.

So, once that part of the game is "solved", you might as well just flip a coin.

[GS Warehouse]

What I used to do was skip the toss-ups entirely and go right to the cards.  The red player would go to the board first; if he/she freezes, the first round is over and the blue player starts the second round (and can change his/her base card).  Should the red player miss a call, the blue player still gets a free chance but can't change the base card.  If he/she misses or freezes, he still gets to start the next round, and so on.  Confused yet?

[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' date=\'sig file\']Learn about the greatest game show host of all time at The Bill Cullen Homepage

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Nothing about Pat Bullard?!  False advertising!  [ducks]

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'GS Warehouse\' date=\'Nov 1 2005, 05:46 PM\'][quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' date=\'sig file\']Learn about the greatest game show host of all time at The Bill Cullen Homepage

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Nothing about Pat Bullard?!  False advertising!  [ducks][/quote]
You DO know I can ban you, right?

[alfonzos]

[/quote]
Here's my problem with the dice system: When it's my turn to guess the sum, I'm simply going to sum up the dice I've rolled and add 4.5 (5.5 if the OP is counting the 0's as 10's) for each of the four dice I don't know about. Or I might just guess a flat 45 or 55. If you take out the "human nature" element, then my aim is to make the higher/lower thing as close to a 50/50 shot as I can.

So, once that part of the game is "solved", you might as well just flip a coin.

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Not really. If I suspect you are going to go with the odds and my roll is unusually high or low I could use that to my advantage and gain control of the cards.

As for the availability of ten-sided dice (hereafter refered to as D10s) at least two domestic companies distribute them: Koplow Games and Chessex. The dice can be found by the boxfull at gaming hobby stores.

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'alfonzos\' date=\'Nov 3 2005, 08:49 AM\']As for the availability of ten-sided dice (hereafter refered to as D10s) at least two domestic companies distribute them: Koplow Games and Chessex. The dice can be found by the boxfull at gaming hobby stores.[/quote]
Sure, and people like us wouldn't have any problem knowing that.  If I needed to get ten-sided dice in a hurry, I know where I could go.  Still, unless you're into that kind of gaming, it's unlikely you have them lying around the house.  So if you want to play a home version of Card Sharks, should you spend your money on an arcane set of unusual dice that have nothing to do with the show, or for a couple dollars more buy a home game that includes the survey questions for which the show was known and have a much more realistic experience?

Putting it another way, playing the game your way is like playing Hangman and calling it Wheel of Fortune.  It's still fun, but it's not the same.

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'alfonzos\' date=\'Nov 3 2005, 04:49 AM\']Not really. If I suspect you are going to go with the odds and my roll is unusually high or low I could use that to my advantage and gain control of the cards.
[/quote]
Well, yeah, if you know my system, you're gonna be able to game it and win. Which is why I wouldn't tell you if I sat down to play with you. This is also why a straight 45 or 55 guess (again, depending on the value of the 0) might be better, it literally turns the game into a straight coin toss, especially since I have more information than you do.

As for the availability of ten-sided dice (hereafter refered to as D10s) at least two domestic companies distribute them: Koplow Games and Chessex. The dice can be found by the boxfull at gaming hobby stores.

And if you don't feel like paying Friendly Local Game Store prices, I've bought dice through http://www.doordice.com that were very reasonably priced. D10s in particular can also be found at educational supply stores, and often there they are cheaper than a FLGS would have them.

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' date=\'Nov 3 2005, 08:12 AM\'][quote name=\'alfonzos\' date=\'Nov 3 2005, 08:49 AM\']As for the availability of ten-sided dice (hereafter refered to as D10s) at least two domestic companies distribute them: Koplow Games and Chessex. The dice can be found by the boxfull at gaming hobby stores.[/quote]
Sure, and people like us wouldn't have any problem knowing that.  If I needed to get ten-sided dice in a hurry, I know where I could go.  Still, unless you're into that kind of gaming, it's unlikely you have them lying around the house.  So if you want to play a home version of Card Sharks, should you spend your money on an arcane set of unusual dice that have nothing to do with the show, or for a couple dollars more buy a home game that includes the survey questions for which the show was known and have a much more realistic experience?
[/quote]
I am HOPING that he meant for those of us who are into such things, he meant you would just pluck ten D10's out of your dice bag and use those. (Of course, since you're STILL not getting a number between 1 and 100 (it will be between 10-100 or 0-90), there's really no compelling reason not to substitute whatever polyhedral dice you like, even the far more ubiquitous D6.)

That said, even I, someone who has been into board games since he could read and learned D&D in 4th grade, am not in possession of 10d10. At least, I don't THINK I am. I know for sure I have six (and three of those are the tens digit of percentiles; they are marked from 00 to 90), but I'm not at all sure about ten.

[alfonzos]

Correction: I should have made that 11D10 not 10 D10. With "0" being valued at zero. This gives a range of zero through ninety-nine. The person who has control of the "question" would roll six dice while the other player would roll the other five.

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'alfonzos\' date=\'Nov 3 2005, 11:03 AM\']Correction: I should have made that 11D10 not 10 D10. With "0" being valued at zero. This gives a range of zero through ninety-nine. The person who has control of the "question" would roll six dice while the other player would roll the other five.

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Great. It's still a broken game. ESPECIALLY if you are moving the balance of knowledge each player has closer to the middle.

[The Ol' Guy]

One possible solution, despite some small flaws, is use your Family Feud game material. I had worked on a Card Guppies version with the 7-card run, and instead of the film clip game for the card change, I used questions from Feud and chose one particular answer from each survey. For example: One hundred people were asked to name their favorite part of Thanksgiving dinner. How many said "pumpkin pie"? The person throwing in the change chip gave their percentage guess, the opponent called "higher" or "lower". Whoever was right got the opportunity to change the card and continue play. Now there are very few answers above 65, but there are some. And the questions aren't very "sexy". Use your Fast Money and regular questions, and you can get your range of between 2 and 60. If you don't blab they're Family Feud questions, you might get people guessing higher numbers on occasion. Now that I think more about it, I'm gonna check out the surveys with 7 answers to develop a Hot Potato game.

[aaron sica]

[quote name=\'The Ol' Guy\' date=\'Nov 3 2005, 03:17 PM\']One possible solution, despite some small flaws, is use your Family Feud game material.

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When we played CS at my first GSC back in '97, that's exactly what we did.

[TLEberle]

I'm not sure what happened to my last post to this thread (maybe it vanished into the ether of the internet?...) but anyway, let's try again.

If you don't want to lay out the five bucks for the CS home game, find a copy of "Split Second" from 1990.  Oodles of "Educated Guess" style questions.  Just make sure that your chosen host knows what kind of question to look for- one time I was asked the brain burner "How many people are surveyed for a 'Family Feud' question?

And Matt, Chris, if yer looking for d10s, I can easily hook you up.  Chris more easily than Matt, but still, I got 'em by the kilo.