If you were on Twitter last night you might have became vaguely aware of a German TV show that was going out involving giant versions of board games and wondering what it was.
So thanks to Nico W we might have a Special Feature on it upcoming soon. It’s called Das Spiel Beginnt, and intended as a large irregular Saturday night event show in the spirit of, and to replace, Wetten Das?
If you want to watch it (be aware it’s three hours long), then right now you can watch it ungeoblocked on the ZDF Mediathek – requires Flash.
And if the idea sounds familiar, here’s the feature we did on Family Game Night.
Nice moving set.
Not bad, and some of the setups were cool (that Loopin’ Louie one was very nice), but the last round can be a bit of an anti-climax if one side wins the majority of the games and the games the other side wins have bad rolls for the score..)
I expect the stars will pretty much let the kids win, making it all a bit moot.
It’s a weird one, I like the set and it’s moving stage, the games feel overlong in the main and occasionally quite boring (Boom Boom Balloon!) and it was surprising to see Jack Straws played with so little paid to Saturday night television.
On the other hand, I liked the set-up to Spitz pas Auf.
I gave this a watch last night, and I quite enjoyed it. I, too, liked the moving platform that the hosts and contestants sat on, which I don’t think would EVER get used over here as it’d be a Health and Safety nightmare!
I liked the variety of games they used, the best being Looping Louie, I especially liked the on-board camera they put on it but we didn’t get to see much from it. There were some good ideas for rules, like with rolling a 6 in Trivial Pursuit letting you pick any category you wanted, although I might have liked a mini version of the classic board better than just the 6 wedges, but I think it might have made the game drag a bit. I think they should have made the tray for the giant red dice a bit higher so that it wouldn’t fall out of it as much.
It DID feel too heavily weighted towards the kids, but I suppose there’s nothing really wrong with that, seeing as they all got to go to different countries as a prize for winning and I think each of them had some sort of experience while they were there, like one of the boys getting to meet Lucas Podolski, I think I heard. I think this could work well as a game with 2 families of 4 playing the games, although it boils down to how many classic games can be made for the show.