With a local K-Mart going out of business, I broke down and bought both Celebrity Name Game and the new Outset Jeopardy!, saving 25% on each. Both have good and bad points. I'm impressed with the timer in CNG, a battery-operated device better made than the Endless Million Dollar Password eardrum breaker. Flip the toggle for your choice of 45 or 75 seconds. Both games wisely figure that you won't always have the same amount of players as the TV shows, so they bend the rules a bit, such as choosing only one cluegiver for the bonus game. No play money - chips are awarded for right answers, turned in for points written on a score pad. A fair number of main game cards are a mix of celebrity names and things (titles, objects, etc). I must admit the third round (TV's Craig cluegiver round) has me scrating my head. I'm attaching the rule sheet -
https://cdn.shptrn.com/media/mfg/1725/media_document/9144/7421_CNG_RULES.pdf?1467327262 - and see if it makes sense to you. As to Jeopardy, most of you have seen the pictures of it, using a variation of the Tyco version. The company site doesn't have the rules up yet, but a couple of things were interesting. In this version, players do not go into debt. If they run out of money, they cannot be fined for wrong answers, according to the rule sheet. Heck, you need paper and pencil for Final Jeopardy - why not just write a running tally of negatives, or turn play money upside down to represent a negative total? The most interesting thing about this version is that there are 72 Jeopardy and 72 Double Jeopardy cards - each card being one category set of questions. This makes for - if you use fresh cards for every game - material for a total of 12 full games with no repeats. There are 36 Final Jeopardy cards. Granted, other than the owner of the game, you'll probably have different people playing the game, so why necessarily have material for 60, 75, 80 or more games printed up, increasing the price of production? Let me ask for some opinions - how many of us have gone all the way through a Password, Family Feud - even a Taboo, Tribond or Trivial Pursuit game - and played all the material before the game wound up at the bottom of the closet, and two years later hits the yard sale or Goodwill? IIRC, Chris Lemon stated that a good TV home game could work with material for at least 25 full games. Super-dedicated fans might burn through that many, but not the average. I'd be interested in your thoughts, as I've been submitting games to companies over the last couple of years, and one thing I'm told is to do all possible to make the game simple and thrifty to manufacture. Less material = less printing = less cost to pass on to the consumer. K-Mart's full shelf price for Jeopardy was $15.99, less than the usual game of that type, averaging $19.99.
