The Floor

Starting on RTL.nl Sunday just gone (video not geoblocked at time of writing but you will need an RTL account), The Floor is John De Mol’s latest quiz, apparently being worked on by Youngest Media (of Bother’s Bar favourite Moneybags fame) for the UK market and apparently the first episode did quite well. And it’s not rubbish!

OK, I don’t speak Dutch and the video had no subs so forgive me if I miss a nuance, but I think I’ve got a broad handle of the quiz – 100 people stand on a grid of 100 squares on the titular LED floor. Each square has a category (I don’t know if these have been preselected or randomly distributed). One person is picked at random to be the challenger. They’re then shown the categories of all the squares around them and they will pick one, the person on that square and category will then duel off. The winner claims the square to add to their territory (in terms of category, the winner’s category expands and eliminates the loser’s).

The duels are played on a 45 second chess clock (with all the issues that may imply – roughly half the duels seemed fairly close, the other half were pretty much blowouts). Each duel is a picture quiz effectively – name the thing. Sometimes just a straight up recognition of a vegetable, tool, piece of clothing or whatever, sometimes more interestingly something like Catchphrase, or a film from the poster. If you’ve seen the sort of picture quizzes on Schlag den Raab/Star you’re in the right ballpark but it lacks the wit of something like the Gallery on Slimste Mens. You can make as many guesses as you need, but if you pass you have to take a three second penalty before the next picture comes up. The Challenger always has the disadvantage of going first. The winner takes the opponent’s square, the loser goes home. The winner also gets the choice of playing on or retiring back to the floor and a new challenger gets selected. Why would you stay on? Because at the end of an episode, the person with the most territory wins a guaranteed €5,000. An episode consists of 13 duels I think. The person who eventually takes the floor wins the €100,000 grand prize.

I’m not really sure there’s an awful lot of strategy to be had – as the categories are slowly revealed across the game you can’t really work towards an area of the floor you like the sound of, and having the bigger territory going into a duel doesn’t give you any sort of advantage, if anything it literally makes you a bigger target as more people surround you hoping for a relatively nicely timed €5,000.

The show runs for 68 minutes online (where I didn’t get any adverts but there were a few interstitials for the Postcode Loterij) and I can’t say it dragged. What I would say though is that about halfway through I was beginning to find it all a bit repetitive – not helped in that some of the rounds were quite similar (we had name the app from the logo closely followed by name the company from the logo, for example), as such it would *possibly* benefit from shorter episodes and a slightly longer run (it’s eight episodes as it stands I believe) or at the very least a few twists in the game or variants on the style of questions. As it is you’re getting 99 fairly similar rounds (compare to De Alleskunder/99 to Beat where the 99 games could be anything) and I’m not sure how bothered I’d be to sit through the full eight hours of it but there’s definitely the grain of a decent idea there I think.

I’d be fascinated to know how many images they’ve got prepped for each category, especially as it looks like if someone is challenged and wins and returns to the floor they seem to keep their category so could be challenged in it again, and in some categories they were getting through them at a rate of knots.