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Deal or No Deal: The Board Game
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How does it work? This is a pretty faithful and interesting reproduction of the show. Make the 22 boxes, slip a value inside each one, shuffle and place them on the board. One player decides which box is going to be the "prize" box and places it on the plinthy bit. Now everyone take turns to pick boxes, with the player on the left opening it with as much drama as they want (as per the instructions). When the value is revealed, cover it up on the board and (this is the exciting bit) press the relevant button on the phone. After a certain amount of boxes (initially five and then after every three) the phone will actually ring and display the bank's offer on the display. The voice will tell you how long you have to come to an individual decision (you do this by placing a deal/no deal card face down on the table in front of you), either 10, 20 or 30 seconds at random. Thankfully during those not very tense early stages, you can end the countdown by pressing the tick button on the phone. If you deal, you write down the value of the deal on the pad as your score for that game, but you still get to call and open boxes, with a view to destroying the board for anyone left in. If you get down to the final two boxes, you can use your "swap" or "no swap" cards to decide which box you want. Whoever has the most cash after a certain amount of games (the instructions suggest six) is the winner. Is it "good"? Once you've spent the hour or so putting the boxes together (this is really something they should have done themselves and charged a bit extra for) - an entirely fiddly and irritating process, which makes it quite possible for people to recognise individual boxes if they stare intently at them unless you're very very good with your hands, I recommend shuffling all the box values at the beginning of a session - the game feels entirely intuitive to play. To me, there is still a slight "what's the point" feeling to playing a game of chance such as this without anything riding on it, but it's a good game for getting people non-gamey people together I reckon, and I would highly recommend everyone putting a wager on it and playing winner-take-all to make it properly tense rather than pretendy tense. Your mileage will probably vary. There's no Noel except on the box, and their is no real banker either - the phone rings and it talks to you, but it's more someone (it sounds a bit like the funny Big Brother) helping you through the game, which is a wasted opportunity. It's great you can prematurely end the countdown, but it's entirely stupid there seems to be no way to bring up the last offer after a deal. Normally you'll all have enough time to commit it to memory, but when you're on a ten second round, it flashes up literally for one second, and few seconds later one second again and then a five seconds countdown. It wouldn't be so bad if the offers were all nice round numbers, but this bank has a definite random element to it and all digits will get used (apart from the final round where it's always the mean value of the two remaining boxes, which is a shame). Stupid stupid stupid. But not half as stupid as the fact that trying to fit the now made boxes back into the box after playing is an intelligence test of truly Krypton Factor semi-final proportions. We cheated and used some scissors to cut off some unneccessary flaps. And they say it's such a dumb show. I want one! Amazon are selling it for £29.99. Shop around though, you can get it as much as a tenner cheaper at Argos Extra. It's a pig to find in shops for whatever reason. As an extra special bonus, here's the old promo pack shot, back when the game was just going to rip off its French cousin, presumably.
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