In the LANDMARK 35th episode of Lewis Murphy’s Fifty 50 Show, Andy Sullivan comes on to talk about Take On The Twisters and Break the Safe.
Incidentally I shuffled the sidebars the other day so if you’re looking for our main discussion posts on recent shows you can now access them directly on the left, there.
I just remembered an idea I had yonks ago that’s quite similar to ToTT. In my version, the contestants each had one egg timer of their own. They buzzed in for questions on the buzzer and had the option of turning over their timer or (I think) turning over someone else’s. The first person to lose all their sand was eliminated.
You force a result by gradually widenening the choke point in the middle of the timer. I never sorted out how ties were broken if (e.g.) two contestants don’t turn their timers over (or have them turned over for them).
If you reconfigured the set and did this as a ‘front game’ to ToTT, it might have solved some of the problems. The person who had any sand remaining could have gone on to play for the cash.
Good point in the podcast about selection of who to pass to – play passing onto another player after a wrong answer should’ve been done by random selection instead.
One other thing bugs me about ToTT – passing the question to someone else makes some sense ONLY if you fancy the 50/50 odds instead of a 1-in-3 guess if you have no idea. But often the questions have one option that is so stupid that you might as well take the either-or choice instead of passing over to the opponent. It negates the potentially better odds.
I think I’ve had a similar idea in the past.
The problem with eliminating the first contestant as a focal point is it’s a rather short round if someone who got flipped first doesn’t get the second question correct.
Well, then you just revert to concentrating on the longest person to last and they play the money game as before.
I think eliminating the worst performer (either by time or money) at some point would have some purpose because at the moment, ToTT has a very ‘flat’ structure. The only ‘progress’ in the tension is the doubling of the values. It’s as if Action Time never went away!
I think that would be difficult because there aren’t enough scoring opportunities.
The main issue is quite clearly the lighting of the twisters – I don’t think anyone really has a problem with the twister game, so you want more of that and less of the other.
Here is my off the top of my head reversioning of Take on the Twisters:
1) Each player is introduced with a 60 Second Twister game. All eight in play, all values revealed.
2) Second round – starting with the player with the lowest score, they get asked six multiple choice questions. Each wrong answer adds 10 seconds to the base time of thirty seconds, say. Twister game!
3) Third round – buzzer round, all twisters turn, correct answer gains control of a twister. Whoever is in control of the twister when it runs out banks the associated value.
I’d keep the final as is, except I’d make the gamble less rubbish.
There you go, I’ve improved the format with literally five seconds thought. It took seven years to come up with apparently, so that must be pretty galling.
ALSO, I’ve come to the conclusion that rising stakes are basically OK provided they’re used intelligently (I blame poker), because if someone was running away with it before they doubled up, then doubling up isn’t actually going to make a contest more exciting.
That’s one of the reasons I want to try out The Line Up as a team game, because in the back of my head I can well justify the rising stakes but I fear whoever goes into the final round ahead will still probably win 99% of the time when really you want that percentage to be a bit lower, and more people = greater spread of results.
Surely more people = less spread of results? Or rather, it’ll push the outcome to depend on what people know and not (as you’d probably prefer for entertainment purposes) how well they ‘played their hand’.
In addition, the reductio ad absurdum argument would be that if 1 million people was on each team, they’d know precisely how hard each question was. The judgement blind spots of one person would shrink when 2 or 3 people are on the team.
Mmm, very probably, I love the bits where contestants misjudge a question but I wonder if it happens often enough and if that is the case then I need to shift the emphasis a little bit.
I want to try it out anyway, I think I’ve got it at the point where there’s just a little bit more uncertainty which is where I want it to be – I have questions, I’m still after teams.
There is every chance I’m overthinking my own format and should stick with the original idea, but at least I can try things out free of risk.
What I’m looking for in ToTT is maybe a bit LESS chaos. To some extent, once you’ve seen it a few times, it does tend to boil down to “one missed question = one missed twister” towards the end. I think I’d have liked to seen a game involving a larger spread of timers and money amounts.