Saturday 7th November, 8:05pm(UK)/9:05pm(CET)
France 2
Splash! They’ve recorded six more! But it won’t be going out as a series, as we understand it they’ll be going out as seasonal specials, the first one of which is the Halloween one to celebrate Halloween, er, last week. To be fair, it was probably intended to go out last week but the Six Nations rugby restarted.
We quite enjoyed the first series as a proof of concept, it sounds like they might have beefed it up for series two – we hope they’ve improved its economy so winning a game feels more worthwhile – indeed, the big wheel is now the semi-final and a timed event with loads of Boyards on the line, and there’s a brand new final where the contestants must grab loads of Boyards from a safe and get out in time, apparently modelled on the Scrooge McDuck diving into a load of coins in the intro to Duck Tales. Not to mention new characters and other new events.
We’re extremely interested to note that they filmed these in COVID times but the adverts suggest no obvious social distancing, so we’re intrigued to find out how they’ve got around that, and hopefully they can use whatever they did on Fort Boyard next year which felt like a highly compromised series.
It will be of course overly long at over two hours and that’s where not being a weekly series will probably help it.
Let us know what you think in the comments.
That was a very decent two hours, good Quality of Life improvements from last year, even if there weren’t many new events.
The changes are thus:
* Fundamental change to the scoring. Instead of paying a fee to play each attraction, they’re given a ticket book at the start of the show. This means that they no longer have the option to spend a bit more for an easier game. On the one hand, quite sad, that’s an interesting thing to explore. On the other, the economy feels more worthwhile – no more paying a load to get an unexciting return after so much work.
* Winning an individual game is worth 50B, a Duel 80B (except in Roni the Fairy – or Roce the Fairy’s evil cousin this episode, played by Roni the Fairy ‘acting’, where the three duels are worth 50B apiece).
* The games are split into seven ‘areas’, a bit like Alton Towers:
– The Kingdom of Horror (i.e. the animal scares),
– The Circus (Ultimate Tag with Camille Cerf in half angel/half demon form and The Beast)
– Extreme Frontier (the action-y ones)
– The Enchanted Pond (with Fairy Roni)
– The Arcade
– I forget the exact wording but Land of Fun I think (the big style fairground games)?
– The Museum of Wonders
Followed by The Big Wheel and the Grand Safe to finish.
The Circus – Team selects three people who have to run around the big tent being chased by a parcour expert called The Beast. Each has a Willybear token attached to their back. The Beast will try and take the tokens. Whichever team can last the longest without being tagged out wins the 80B and get the chance to win the Joker – here the roles are reversed, two members of the winning team try and catch The Beast within a minute. If they succeed they get a Joker, which means in one subsequent duel if they don’t like who Willy has selected they can sub someone of their choice in.
The Arcade – there’s an (unknown) sixth game in the rotation, the first team to win two games wins a Golden Ticket, giving them a bonus event to win Boyards with in the next Zone.
Kingdom of Horror and Extreme Frontier are one duel game then one individual game each, World of Fun was the bonus individual game and two duel games. Presumably they can shuffle the order of these Zones if they wanted.
Museum of Wonders – this has more variety this time round, might be a quiz, might be some sort of physical test based on the person it’s based on. First to two wins 80B.
The Big Wheel – this starts at 500B for both teams and seems to drop 1B every 0.5 seconds. Whatever is left on their money clock when they pull the lever at the top of the wheel is theirs to add to their total. B converted to Euros on a table like last year, but this time round the team with the most B can earn even more in the safe.
The Safe – a Big safe with (allegedly) ONE MILLION Boyards in it. Two ways into (and out of) the safe – a slippery slide and a ladder. Three of the team have ninety seconds to get in, grab as much as they can depositing in a big cauldron outside the safe (they can go in and out as many times as they like) and make sure they’re out by the end of the time – after a minute one of the exits is blocked off, 30 seconds later the other exit is blocked off, if anyone’s caught inside then no bonus is awarded, if everybody escapes then everything gathered is counted and added to their winnings from earlier to make a final total to convert into cash.
EVENT QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS
BOYARD COASTER – now the platforms are unstable making the game a bit more challenging.
PINCES – there are now ‘compartments’, each with a Willy in, but each also with a different creature inhabiting it.
SUPER BOYARD KART – Double the players for double the mayhem! Only first one across the line counts though.
NEW EVENTS
– Ski Slope – it’s that game from TORE where they have to get up a steepening wall by jumping between small platforms.
Next one Christmas I’d imagine?
What I thought was quite interesting is that they’ve pretty much eliminated Fort Boyard from any of the backstory having gone in quite heavily on it last year. Plenty of allusions to the style, but Pere Fouras didn’t get even one mention, save for a small reuse of last year’s instructions in the Arcade. They’ve gone big on Willy’s ownership.
The Fun Zone is titled Le Monde Funtastique, no doubt a reference to Olivier Minne’s old show covered in this very site.
With the Arcade, I think they’ve removed one game and added two. There are two new ones, certainly, but I can’t for the life of me remember what the game they removed was. There definitely were five games on the wheel last year, wasn’t there?
I believe we saw four games in the arcade last year – cockroach fishing (La Pêche aux Cafards), pistols (Les Pistoleros), basketball (Le Boyard-Ball) and De la Terre à la Lune.
Given the last one came straight from the Fort, it seems the most likely to have disappeared.
Boyard Ball is the Baseball Noughts and Crosses, no?
Apologies, there are actually two games there (which makes the five Alex quoted). Since we don’t have the episodes to hand I had to source it from a wiki which quotes the first episode as Boyard Ball and De La Terre, but forgets to note Basketball which was mentioned in some of the fan forums’ episode discussions.
Boyard Ball is indeed the Baseball Noughts and Crosses.
Basketball is well… basketball.
Also interestingly of note, watching though a VPN on Chrome it was autotranslating the subtitles, which is fun! Although they’re about twenty seconds behind what’s happening on screen which was mildly annoying.
Basically agree with everything that has been said. Some good changes. I think the fact that some zones only have a limited amount of games to be played might be fine by the fact we will rarely see the show on as oppose to every week.
Although. Only got 1.35 Million viewers and 6.1% audience score. (Was against masked singer)
One little change in the Xmas eps- they no longer compare Boyards won to a chart to determine the winnings for the teams; it’s a straight 7 Euros per Boyard.
I like the vault a lot- if they ever decided to move the treasure room indoors in the Fort for whatever reason they could do something like this. Didn’t hear what the ratings were but wouldn’t be shocked if it’s two and out- it’s a great concept but just missing something here and there (and like I said in the first season, if it didn’t have the Boyard name attached would it work- and I still think it could)
I’ll cover the ratings first – and they are grim reading:
* 25th (Christmas 1) – 495k (5.1%)
* 26th (Christmas 2) – 588k (4.6%)
* 27th (Regular 1) – still unannounced
Some suggestions locally that it had been poorly advertised, and the inevitable comparisons with the program it replaced – a compilation episode of Affaire Conclue (Closed Case) the day before managed 1.71m (17.0%) according to OZAP.
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As for the shows themselves: you can see the improvements from season one, but you can also see a lot of tinkering between episodes – particularly between Dec 26 and Dec 27 (we believe the Dec 27 one was filmed much earlier in the run).
* The prizes are now a straight conversion, 1 boyard = 7 euros, and the chart has gone. It does feel like the teams are being rewarded less for their participation.
* The joker can buy a double-clepsydre (which was hastily edited – such that the on-screen timer was running 20% fast in the Dec 27 episode). and is something worth considering for Fort Boyard (+50% maybe?)
* With the zones, we see a mix of 2 solo and 1 duel, 1 solo (golden ticket) and 2 duels, or 3 duels.
* Clepsydre games allow a second chance on tough games like Boyard Coaster – in one case a player missed the jump and completed the course twice to win.
* The somewhat hasty recalibration of the games – e.g. Le Labryinthe removed the ropes when it was “too easy” on Dec 27, only for the Dec 25 episode to take two minutes to complete that obstacle (after using the polystyrene doors for grip); The Big Wheel increased from 1.33B (Dec 27) to 2B (Dec 26) per second lost.
* The change from 3 to 4 players in the vault is problematic – because they’d generally perform better with three given the bottlenecks.
* The arcade section is pretty long given it only awards a golden ticket, which is a free game in the next zone (with standard rewards – i.e. no progressive bonuses) – given we’ve seen the extreme zone be next, in some cases you’d prefer to finish second!
Finally:
* Never nice to see an injury on the show, hopefully they had a speedy recovery after the ankle injury on the jumping platform game (Dec 25, Takeshi Castle Zone).
* A nod to the team that realised they could keep the ladder exit from the vault in use constantly, preventing the producers from closing it – so they closed the slide exit instead first.
* A panto-style “boo-hiss” to the person pivoting this to be focused at a younger audience, just as The Grinch kidnaps Santa on Christmas Day…
Two more episodes next weekend, going to need a Christmas miracle to save it from the chop at this point…
I caught up on the final two episodes this weekend (better late than never as the replays are about to expire), and not too much to add apart from quirky observations (the final two episodes are the middle of the run – so we’ve seen the before and after)
* The golden ticket curse happened twice – La Piste De Ski on Saturday, and naturally Baptiste getting La Maison Des Clowns on Sunday.
* We finally saw a proper race on La Grande Roue (Sunday) with the teams tied after the seven zones – far too many were either foregone conclusions (e.g. 300B+ leads) or one team had a clear disadvantage (e.g. both choices had issues with heights).
* We saw a couple of edge cases happen – if a team has zero going into Le Fee Roni then Olivier throws the coin instead; La Roue can end in a draw (because the fastest speed isn’t that fast) and award 25B each.
Also a nice touch that the White team split the vault winnings with the Red team (who ended up with three players?) on the final episode, so both teams were awarded €7,063.
So there we have it – while the last episodes clawed back some viewers (624k or 4.9% for Ep. 5, not disclosed for Ep. 6), the damage is already done and I suspect that is the end of that.