The Game Show Forum
The Game Show Forum => The Big Board => Topic started by: Sodboy13 on August 19, 2014, 10:44:59 PM
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Seeing the fan-made TPIR Expansion got me thinking about the idea of DIY game show home gaming, as did a lucky find I had today.
I went into Five Below and saw they had Trivial Pursuit's "Bet You Know It" edition from a couple years back for $5. Looking it over, I had a light bulb go off, and bought two sets. That gives me 300 single-category, multiple-question cards, display holders for 8 cards (or, for my needs, 6) at a time, scoring chips, and two dice marked 1-5, with a special character instead of the "6" on each.
So, for $10, plus the Quizzard I have at home, I now have The Big Showdown.
Of course, this is far from the first time I've had an idea like this; for instance, my TPIR home game consists of the Endless Games edition referenced above, the majority of two 1986 MB sets, and that electronic doohickey, which was worth the $8 clearance price because, hey, it's a wheel and a Plinko board, and I never, ever have to put in the batteries or use these cards.
As I'm sure a bunch of us who have bought home games have thought, "Oh, this would be even better if it just had x", and many of us have the level of interest and creativity to actually put such things together, I thought it would be interesting to know what you've done with your home games, or if you've made any of your own from scratch.
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I went into Five Below and saw they had Trivial Pursuit's "Bet You Know It" edition from a couple years back for $5. Looking it over, I had a light bulb go off, and bought two sets. That gives me 300 single-category, multiple-question cards, display holders for 8 cards (or, for my needs, 6) at a time, scoring chips,
I love the feel, sound and numbering of the chips from that game and keep my eye out for it while at a thrift store. I was overcome with glee when I found it on a recent trip. I took the chips, a stack of cards from various games, several cards from Skip-bo, and cobbled together a facsimile of a German game that is best described as Scattergories meets Spades.
Having access to a copier at work and lots of cardstock of my own I ran the Winner's Circle games from the Endless $25,000 Pyramid through and cut them into individual cards. (This was quite a lot of work, but not as much as I thought it might have been) I took those and a bunch of money chips from Meeple Source and created a Winner's Circle relay race game that played decently given that most of my family isn't really familiar with the finer points of the show.
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I, like many others around these parts, have taken to building software to enhance the home game content where possible. I'm still new to it, and my forte is PowerPoint, but it works for what I need it to do. I'm also one of, again, many others around here who does game show events at various conventions in and around my place of residence (in my case, Toronto, Canada).
A thought emerges: let's do a worldwide 24-Hour Game Show Marathon. We've had east and west... let's bring north to the party, and if scheduling allows, we should do this thing synchronized between all of us.
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I've been tinkering off and on with a program called Stencyl (http://www.stencyl.com/), and it's proven to be a damn handy little package. Stencyl is supposed to be for making flash/android/iOS games, but it's been pretty good for rigging up a control program for your own buzzer system. Especially considering that at its bare-bones, flash-a-number-on-the-screen simplest, you can whip one up in about ten minutes without knowing a single thing about Actionscript.
Which is really handy because I don't. And it's because of Stencyl that I managed to whip up a control program for Panel Quiz Attack 25 (http://db.orangedox.com/C9MPPdwx6MbqCKa1gE/PanelQuizAttack25Control.0.0.2.meh.zip) over the course of two weeks that I wanted to share with everyone. I've also included the actual stencyl source file, if you wanted to either tinker around with it yourself or just see what kind of Byzantine mess I've managed to make with it.
if you're looking to make your own sound effects, --like NES style sound effects-- another decent little package to consider would be bxfr (http://www.bfxr.net). It has a web interface where you can mess around with the different sliders until you get the sound you're looking for, a mixer where you can combine sounds, and it also has a standalone version you can download for local and offline use (through Adobe AIR).
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and cobbled together a facsimile of a German game that is best described as Scattergories meets Spades.
Was Sticht?
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Was Sticht?
No, that came with Mu and More. The German name is Haste Worte, which describes the elevator pitch.
Given a category players have 30 seconds to write out as many answers as they can. They then bid how many points they'll score that round. Answers are revealed starting with the player who bid least. His answers are crossed off of the lists of anyone yet to read (so the tightrope is bidding enough to score well, but not so much that enough of your answers are nuked and you get shut out). If you make your bid you score it, if you don't, you score nothing at all for that frame.
As friendly and light as Scattergories is, Hasty Words is that evil.
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Seeing the fan-made TPIR Expansion got me thinking about the idea of DIY game show home gaming, as did a lucky find I had today.
I went into Five Below and saw they had Trivial Pursuit's "Bet You Know It" edition from a couple years back for $5. Looking it over, I had a light bulb go off, and bought two sets. That gives me 300 single-category, multiple-question cards, display holders for 8 cards (or, for my needs, 6) at a time, scoring chips, and two dice marked 1-5, with a special character instead of the "6" on each.
So, for $10, plus the Quizzard I have at home, I now have The Big Showdown.
When we did GSC 8 in Cleveland 16 years ago (16 years already!?!?), that was exactly how we did The Big Showdown (Quizzard + Trivial Pursuit Cards). We also used Trivial Pursuit cards for doing categories for The Joker's Wild, rotating categories in and out of the 5 available Joker categories, though you could play all 6 categories at a time, I guess.
I have also tried Wipeout (Tomarken version) on a Milton Bradley "Concentration" board with decent results. Write down the possible right & wipeout answers on a piece of paper or dry-erase board with a corresponding number and place it just above the Concentration board. Use the back of the yellow Concentration prize cards or print & cut out your own "$" or "Wipeout" cards and hide them behind the appropriate matching Concentration numbers. I never had a Hot Spot Card as it was hard to shuffle it back into the remaining numbers on the board. For the final round, I had determined how many changes one can make instead of setting a time limit since it was so easy to switch numbers (answers) on the board.
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Given a category players have 30 seconds to write out as many answers as they can. They then bid how many points they'll score that round. Answers are revealed starting with the player who bid least. His answers are crossed off of the lists of anyone yet to read (so the tightrope is bidding enough to score well, but not so much that enough of your answers are nuked and you get shut out). If you make your bid you score it, if you don't, you score nothing at all for that frame.
As friendly and light as Scattergories is, Hasty Words is that evil.
One of our gamers homebrewed a translated copy of that a few years back, and we play it a couple of times a year at the end of a long night or weekend still. My proudest moment (or most shameful, depending on perspective) was leapfrogging the entire penalty track using the "Disney Characters" category by naming the entire major cast of Gargoyles.
"But MacBeth isn't a Disney... oh... crap."
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Having access to a copier at work and lots of cardstock of my own I ran the Winner's Circle games from the Endless $25,000 Pyramid through and cut them into individual cards. (This was quite a lot of work, but not as much as I thought it might have been)
Cardstock is great, because you can just go to your local office supply store and it will last longer than you can ever imagine, but I imagine business card paper would probably work just as well and require less manual labor. In the end it's probably six of one, etc.
The slips for all my bank's transactions came in stacks with cardboard separators. I had been collecting those to use as sturdy backs for (hopefully reusable) game show hosting cards.
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(Edit: Yeah, I didn't realize Sodboy13 already started a thread about like this -- I went ahead and reported the thread to the mods. Would we be better off keeping this thread seperate or should it be merged with his?)
I merged them together. For those who may have missed it since it gets merged in by creation time, you may want to browse Sodboy13's post, Reply #3 (http://www.gameshowforum.org/index.php/topic,26591.msg329734.html#msg329734), above.
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I've written several games in Flash and use content from unrelated games as sources for content:
- Bumper Stumpers (Vanity Chase game (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8431/vanity-chase))
- Couch Potatoes (Remote control game (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9023/mtv-remote-control) for questions/Couch Up round & TV cast photos for Channel Roulette)
- Double Talk (In Other Words game (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28549/other-words))
- The Joker's Wild (Bezzerwizzer game (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/32441/bezzerwizzer))
- Monopoly (several crossword clue sources)
- Trivia Trap (several multiple choice question sources and Jeopardy!/TP Bet You Know It content)
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A thought emerges: let's do a worldwide 24-Hour Game Show Marathon.
I feel like we do that already. We plan for six months, pour money and resources and time and energy into putting together something, work with charities to get them money, grind to get press and have viewers join us from around the world. It's a charity event that we put on because we care about the charities we give money to, and the game shows that we play. If you want to organize a 24-Hour Game Show Marathon North, I can't stop you. It's not something we've copyrighted, but anyone who's using the "24-Hour Game Show Marathon" name is using it with our blessing since our blood/sweat/tears have been poured into the event.
We let the good guys at Home Game Enterprises use the name modified with "West" because they bring their own flair and sensibilities into the proceedings. I personally craft their logo to mirror what we do with it because we share a common philosophy: taking what we love and putting it to work to raise money for causes we feel strongly about. Travis, Joe and Ben took me to dinner and asked for my blessing, which I was more than happy to oblige because they showed me they could mirror the quality that we hope to accomplish (even if our microphones didn't work for 24 straight hours and no one could hear a damn word we said).
If you'd like to do a 24-Hour Game Show Marathon, e-mail me at cory@pacdudegames.com and show me you can do it without my help. We're open to growing it as long as it meets our standards.
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Also, I make Flash games sometimes to play at bars and stuff. Just to stay on topic.
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If you'd like to do a 24-Hour Game Show Marathon, e-mail me at cory@pacdudegames.com and show me you can do it without my help. We're open to growing it as long as it meets our standards.
Sounds great. We'll talk.
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Also, I make Flash games sometimes to play at bars and stuff. Just to stay on topic.
That reminds me, I liked your "Drop The Bomb" game so much, I ripped it off adapted it for a multiple-player physical game using some customizable dice and the electronic Trivial Pursuit handheld.
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Also, I make Flash games sometimes to play at bars and stuff. Just to stay on topic.
That reminds me, I liked your "Drop The Bomb" game so much, I ripped it off adapted it for a multiple-player physical game using some customizable dice and the electronic Trivial Pursuit handheld.
I adapted it for a multiple-player physical game too: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/drop-the-bomb along with the rules: https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.thegamecrafter.com/1408559649/Drop-the-Bomb-Rules.pdf
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It's not a major modification, but I'm adding Box 23 to my copy of UK Deal or No Deal. The game came with 24 boxes, so designating one of the two extras as Box 23 isn't hard. Ultimately, I'd like to have a normal box 23 and the modified one used during Deal's Summer Party week a few weeks back (Double, +£20,000, Half, Quarter, Nothing).
I used three d20s for Bullseye, with each of two d20s representing the upper windows (1-5 would be increasing amounts for category 1, 6-10 would be the amounts for category 2, and so on). The remaining d20 would be the contract window--1-3 would be 1 question, 4-7 is 2 questions, 8-11 3 questions, 12-15 4 questions, 16-18 5 questions, 19 and 20 are bullseyes.
Points to Jake for mentioning Bezzerwizzer.
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If you'd like to do a 24-Hour Game Show Marathon, e-mail me at cory@pacdudegames.com and show me you can do it without my help. We're open to growing it as long as it meets our standards.
Did you ask the original British creators of the 24 Hour Panel People show if your idea met their standards? You said that you can't copyright the name or concept, so how is it your call as to whether or not someone else has your group's permission to do it?
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Did you ask the original British creators of the 24 Hour Panel People show if your idea met their standards? You said that you can't copyright the name or concept, so how is it your call as to whether or not someone else has your group's permission to do it?
He's saying, legally, no, he can't stop them. However, if they want to be affiliated with his group (and ostensibly that implies some offering of shared resources) they will need to get his group's blessing.
If some dick wants to steal his design work and his logos and stuff and use it for their own thing, yeah, they could probably do that. But they'd still be a dick. Don't be a dick.
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If you'd like to do a 24-Hour Game Show Marathon, e-mail me at cory@pacdudegames.com and show me you can do it without my help. We're open to growing it as long as it meets our standards.
Did you ask the original British creators of the 24 Hour Panel People show if your idea met their standards? You said that you can't copyright the name or concept, so how is it your call as to whether or not someone else has your group's permission to do it?
You know what, Travis? You're absolutely right. Andrew can go and create a 24-Hour Game Show Marathon if he'd like. We were inspired by 24-Hour Panel People and made it our own: more games, less panel shows, more game shows. And we did it for three years in a row, raising more money and getting better at this bullshit as we went along. And it's not my call if someone wants to do likewise. And considering all the support we've gotten for the past three years from this place, I should have known better than to have been protective of the name of the work that I'm proud of doing. It's not like searching 24-Hour Game Show Marathon on google brings up my event or anything.
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If some dick wants to steal his design work and his logos and stuff and use it for their own thing, yeah, they could probably do that. But they'd still be a dick. Don't be a dick.
And I'm not suggesting that our game show fan from the Great White North take the various and sundry art and sound stuff, because that would be High Dickery. But he could call it All Night Games or something else, and that's the end of it.
/so many names for tribute bands, so little time and so few hotel rooms to trash.
//I'm well beyond the point that I can stay up all night anyway, I'm the last person who will be doing 24 Hour Anything.
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I'm really getting tired of this notion that I'm trying to drive people away from the board--it's false and it's libelous. So cut it the hell out.
I was responding to a point made in an earlier post in the thread and trying to clarify the issue. You're the one who flew off the handle when the shaky legal ground was mentioned. As you'll see, I wasn't recommending that anyone steal your property or brand (NB: I've donated money and quiz material to your outfit for no reason other than to help out a cause I believe in). So chill out there, guy.
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Whether you intended to drive anyone away from this board is up for debate. Whether you are is, at least in my case, verifiable. The way you presented yourself was in a veiled attack on the legitimacy of what I tried to do, whether or not you intended it to be. I put in far too much hard work to get shit on by you.
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Many moons ago, I took a WOF game for the PC and updated it, using only MS Paint. This game still featured "Vanna" walking across the stage, turning letters around. The TV show had just recently updated to the monitor wall.
I got into the various files (.gifs, if I remember correctly ... may have been .jpgs) and inserted "monitors" where there had been trilons. When playing, the blank spaces remained green with the WOF logo, just as on the show. Each "active" trilon/monitor turned off-white as the lights came on. And I changed the font to match what's used in the show.
It worked really well! "Vanna"'s hand would sweep across the former trilon, and the new "monitor" would flash with the revealed letter.
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It worked really well! "Vanna"'s hand would sweep across the former trilon, and the new "monitor" would flash with the revealed letter.
I love little hacks like that. BUNCHA years ago there was a shareware logic game I enjoyed called "Marple." (It's since been done for iOS.). One of the perks for registering it was that they gave you a whole ton of different skins for the game tiles. I put two and two together and hacked the "empty space" tile into a Pyramid trilon. (Don't get me wrong, your hack is way better. :))
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Many moons ago, I took a WOF game for the PC and updated it, using only MS Paint. This game still featured "Vanna" walking across the stage, turning letters around.
Was that the GameTek WOF that used only four colors?
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I wasn't happy with the handful of games in the 86MB TPiR game so I made dozens of extra pricing game boards. Some of them have moving parts (a slot to insert the Credit Card, a Grand Game slider, etc).
They turned out as well as you'd expect from someone with no computer (we're talking late 80s here) & no artistic ability what-so-ever.
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I went into Five Below and saw they had Trivial Pursuit's "Bet You Know It" edition from a couple years back for $5. Looking it over, I had a light bulb go off, and bought two sets. That gives me 300 single-category, multiple-question cards, display holders for 8 cards (or, for my needs, 6) at a time, scoring chips,
I love the feel, sound and numbering of the chips from that game and keep my eye out for it while at a thrift store. I was overcome with glee when I found it on a recent trip. I took the chips, a stack of cards from various games, several cards from Skip-bo, and cobbled together a facsimile of a German game that is best described as Scattergories meets Spades.
Having access to a copier at work and lots of cardstock of my own I ran the Winner's Circle games from the Endless $25,000 Pyramid through and cut them into individual cards. (This was quite a lot of work, but not as much as I thought it might have been) I took those and a bunch of money chips from Meeple Source and created a Winner's Circle relay race game that played decently given that most of my family isn't really familiar with the finer points of the show.
I'd love to know more about this Winner's Circle relay race game of yours, Travis. Sounds like fun! How was it played and did it have the Pyramid-esque restrictions in play (You know...give only a list, no prepositional phrases, yada cubed).
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Divide the group into teams, whoever is giving has one minute to convey the subjects to team members one at a time, after a right answer, pass or foul the clue giver then plays with the next partner down the line, and so on. Since there's a stack of cards there's no guarantee that they'll get harder and increase in value along the way, or you might get a murderer's row of top boxes one after the other. Correct answers score the value on the card (and this is where Endless "shines", they chose poorly for more than a few valuations), a pass or violation deducts that value from the total for that turn. The team wins however much money they scored in net for that turn, or the opponents get whatever was owed due to passes if the clue giver went in the hole. After everyone has a go clue giving the team that piled up more money wins the game.
I did have to ease up on the fouls because the other players weren't as devoted fans as I am, and I let some things go because I have enough problems with my family being a stick-in-the-mud, I don't need to be the party game hardass as well. I think it would be an awesome game with a group of veteran players.
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Many moons ago, I took a WOF game for the PC and updated it, using only MS Paint. This game still featured "Vanna" walking across the stage, turning letters around.
Was that the GameTek WOF that used only four colors?
I did have the GameTek WOF ... but I also had a couple of others, and I don't remember the one I hacked having only four colors. It looked fairly realistic for the time. The players didn't look like cartoons. But it was a long time ago, so my memory is foggy. That may have been it.
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I did have the GameTek WOF ... but I also had a couple of others, and I don't remember the one I hacked having only four colors. It looked fairly realistic for the time. The players didn't look like cartoons. But it was a long time ago, so my memory is foggy. That may have been it.
If you used Paint (within Windows), you were probably past the four-color-CGA days of PC gaming. I believe CRuss is referring to the very first iteration of the PC WOF games, which would very likely have been CGA.
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Many moons ago, I took a WOF game for the PC and updated it, using only MS Paint. This game still featured "Vanna" walking across the stage, turning letters around.
Was that the GameTek WOF that used only four colors?
I did have the GameTek WOF ... but I also had a couple of others, and I don't remember the one I hacked having only four colors. It looked fairly realistic for the time. The players didn't look like cartoons. But it was a long time ago, so my memory is foggy. That may have been it.
I think this might be the 1994 or so "deluxe" edition of the game. I "hacked" the category graphics by changing the letter set color in paint.
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I think this might be the 1994 or so "deluxe" edition of the game. I "hacked" the category graphics by changing the letter set color in paint.
The time period seems about right.
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On my iPhone, I replaced the intro video in my Countdown app with video of the intro sequence from episode 1, from 1982. So hey, there's that.
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I, too, have a home game creation to report. Somewhere around 1992, I embarked on a project to write a computer program to play the game Concentration. In celebration of tomorrow's 56th anniversary of Concentration's debut, I have pointed my digital camera at the monitor of my 386 computer and recorded game play of my work-in-progress. I wish the video's clarity was better, but it's the best I've been able to produce thus far. I wrote this program using QuickBasic. I had the luxury of being able to use 16 out of 256 available colors, and there isn't a sound card in this computer, just a PC speaker. My intent was to make the game format match that of the original series.
http://youtu.be/t7MVShy7TJI
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Hee! All props for doing a 30-square version of the game in 1992. :)
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Nice work! You do great rebuses ... and you get extra points for the dramatic lighting around the "prize doors".
I could spend many, many hours playing this game.
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Has anyone ever found a game that is similar enough to Smush with material that could be used to DIY a version of the game show?
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Has anyone ever found a game that is similar enough to Smush with material that could be used to DIY a version of the game show?
I would say that would be a no-brainer for a trivia board game, but man would that be a lot of labor-intensive content to write.
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If you're not interested in playing, you could do worse than culling from Hashtag Wars to get started.
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With some massaging for difficulty many of the questions from 30 Second Mysteries could be used for a version of Million Dollar Mind Game. (I would add a rule where the team that is "up" is allowed to ask questions in the fashion of What's My Line? to get help.)
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Bumping this one up from the depths. If you'd like to make some big dice with customized sides for Let 'Em Roll, The Big Showdown, or whatever else you have in mind, these foam cubes from Dollar Tree are an affordable and simple way to do it. The description says they're 2.25" on a side, but that's actually the diameter of the dry-erase circle - the cubes are about 3". Now, if you wanted to go that extra step, Avery sells sheets of glossy white circular printer labels that are 2" in diameter, making for a nice fit.
https://www.dollartree.com/Teaching-Tree-Dry-Erase-Foam-Blocks/p370932/index.pro (https://www.dollartree.com/Teaching-Tree-Dry-Erase-Foam-Blocks/p370932/index.pro)
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Bumping this one up from the depths. If you'd like to make some big dice with customized sides for Let 'Em Roll, The Big Showdown, or whatever else you have in mind, these foam cubes from Dollar Tree are an affordable and simple way to do it. The description says they're 2.25" on a side, but that's actually the diameter of the dry-erase circle - the cubes are about 3". Now, if you wanted to go that extra step, Avery sells sheets of glossy white circular printer labels that are 2" in diameter, making for a nice fit.
https://www.dollartree.com/Teaching-Tree-Dry-Erase-Foam-Blocks/p370932/index.pro (https://www.dollartree.com/Teaching-Tree-Dry-Erase-Foam-Blocks/p370932/index.pro)
Now THIS is a bump-worthy post. Good find!
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While I don't need a dozen of those, I would be happy to split such an order three or four ways and pick up my share at an appointed time and place; such as the first weekend of August at the Tropicana hotel.
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Curious: is it squishy foam, or rigid foam? Can't really tell from the image.
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It's rigid, not rubbery or squishy.
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It's rigid, not rubbery or squishy.
Gotcha, thanks! :)
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Giving another bump because I finally got around to making a set.
EDIT: Holy jeez, those photos do not scale down to the window at all. I'll have to make them smaller outside of my phone. Here they are:
https://twitter.com/hockey_brunch/status/1062558766049226752?s=19
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Giving another bump because I finally got around to making a set.
EDIT: Holy jeez, those photos do not scale down to the window at all. I'll have to make them smaller outside of my phone. Here they are:
https://twitter.com/hockey_brunch/status/1062558766049226752?s=19
VERY nicely made! +1
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I liiiiiiike. Will have to do something similar with my set.
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Ikea has a 24-segment prize wheel for $20.
(http://"https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/30387038/") So, all you'd need is some readily-available WOF layout graphics, some sturdy/photo printer paper, and if you wanted the segments all the way out to the edge of the wheel, a hole punch. Make your own Star Wheel on the cheap, too.
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Make your own Star Wheel on the cheap, too.
If it lands on Dawson the first time I spin, that thing's getting returned to the store. :P
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Link seems to be broken for me, so:
LUSTIGT Prize wheel game (https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/30387038/)
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Make your own Star Wheel on the cheap, too.
If it lands on Dawson the first time I spin, that thing's getting returned to the store. :P
Just wait until Chuck Woolery comes out and punches you in the mouth.