Ooh, Dave (U&Dave, sorry) are doing an escape room show, only about ten years after the zeitgeist and about 35 years after The Haunted Dungeon on Ghost Train on Sunday. The Way Out is based on a Belgian format (of course) and will see Mel Giedroyc guide/infuriate teams of comics led by Ed Gamble and Nish Kumar through four different rooms, with the team with the fastest cumulative time at the end of the series being the winner. Hopefully there will be lots of shouting at each other, although one of these teams seems quite a bit more competitive than the other on paper.

It’s nice to see Dave dipping its toes into this sort of thing, we quite liked Battle In The Box and I can’t think of any Dave originals since, they seem to struggle to breakthrough a bit nowadays, and you don’t even get comedians making jokes about episodes appearing on Dave many years later anymore, sad. Hopefully they have given it the budget to do it justice.

Here what the German version on Amazon Prime looks like (that you can’t watch in the UK):

We still think the best televised escape room show was Sci-Fi’s Race to Escape with Jimmy Pardo, of which one episode exists on Youtube, even if it was more five discrete puzzles in a room against the clock than an interconnected woven escape room per se. This isn’t the episode sadly, but we loved that when it took one team forty minutes to spot a giant number written in some shelves they had the balls to let it play out minute by excruciating minute to hilarious effect when I dare say lesser productions would have panicked and thrown the answer at them. Proper shout at the screen stuff.

I just wanted to highlight a new Talpa Dutch quiz which started going out recently, In De Ring (it means In The Ring) as it seems to have lit up the Discord over the past week, and it’s already sold to Australia (where it will be called Caught In The Middle). Having watched it, I can’t quite decide if it’s clever or annoying or both or neither. If you want to watch it yourself you can watch it with a VPN (protip: browsers such as Microsoft Edge will autotranslate the subs as well).

Postcode Loterij In De Ring sees Dutch television icon Linda de Mol challenge two people working as a team in the middle of a set of 12 concentric rings try and knock out a horde of 100 Outsiders, who are there all series long, in a bid to win €50,000 – the money will be given away no matter what, but will our team take it or will members of the Outsiders?

The Outsiders have all answered a lot of limited-list questions pre-show (think questions in the original Pointless style). Their job is to answer each question to the best of their ability with the least-obvious least-obvious answers, because if the players in the ring match any of their answers they are eliminated from the game. Sidenote: we don’t know what happens if any of the Outsiders submit incorrect answers.

Twelve concentric rings, each representing a question, stand between the horde of Outsiders and the players In The Ring, the main portion of the game is played in the outer eleven. A question pops up, and on the table in front of the players a rather sexy looking pie-chart comes up which shows the distribution of answers, but unlabelled so not what those answers are. The players must answer the question correctly, but also answer it so that it matches and knocks out as many people as possible (we presume if they give an incorrect answer then they’ve wasted the question and everyone advances).

For example, if the question is “name a song on Queen’s Greatest Hits volume 1”, the pie chart shows an answer with 24, an answer with 14, an answer with 10 and so on. The obvious answer is Bohemian Rhapsody, but the Outsiders know that’s the obvious answer and will try and pick something else. The players in the ring know that’s the obvious answer as well, so will try and predict a different answer more people have gone with. Once they’ve locked in, if the answer is right, floor lasers shoot out of the Ring and turn the Outsiders medallions red and eliminating them if they’ve matched. In this instance Bicycle Race was the answer to pick as 24 people chose it – through a lack of knowledge or second-or-third guessing, Bohemian Rhapsody would have knocked 10 out.

To help the team In The Ring they have two jokers which they can only play provided they’ve given a correct answer, and only once each through the game – they can change their answer (if they discover they’ve knocked out two people when they could have knocked out 20, for example) or they can give a second answer (take out two chunks of of people with one question). As the Outsiders are the same every episode, Linda frequently gets a chance to banter with the more familiar faces.

Repeat until the 12th question, the Golden Ring, and this is the chance for the Players in the ring and the handful of Outsiders left to win money. A question with precisely 10 correct answers is asked – we’ve had Pointless, now it’s Tenable – and once again we get a pie chart of how everyone has answered. To win the money, the Players in the ring must keep giving correct answers until all the remaining Outsiders have been knocked out. To help they have one “insurance” answer – an answer they can give that won’t incur a penalty if it’s incorrect, although it’s wasted if they give an insured answer and it’s right. Otherwise, with the first wrong answer they give, any Outsiders still in the game split €25,000 equally, but the players In The Ring can still win the other half. A second wrong answer means any remaining Outsiders split the other €25,000 also and it’s game over.

It’s certainly watchable and at about 45 minutes doesn’t outstay its welcome, but with questions that aren’t horrifically difficult it’s very difficult to know how to strategise really. Whatsmore, I’m not sure how much difference knocking out the horde has when it comes to the endgame, if you have lots of people remaining they’re probably going to clump around certain answers and you’ll probably need 7-8 of them, if you have few people remaining you’re probably still going to have to scattergun 7-8 correct answers to hit the right ones to knock them out, so it’s all much of a muchness really.

It’s already selling, so it will be interesting to see if this becomes Talpa’s next The Floor. I don’t think it’s quite as good, but it’s not rubbish.

They’re here! Thanks for all your votes and comments, you can read the full Poll write-up at UKGameshows.com and I suggest you do because under the cut are this year’s statistics.

I’m just putting the finishing touches on the Poll results, providing no last minute issues they should go up on Tuesday around 9:30pm.

Right now however here’s something that’s been bought up in the Discord, Four Wishes, a new Korean Youtube brain survival show that’s been running for a while but they’ve just started adding English captions, one episode for now and adding on a weekly basis. It’s been created by a collective called MINDZERO, who apparently did some work on The Devil’s Plan: Death Room on Netflix. The set-up is broadly as you’d expect, 10 people play puzzly games at a mansion, they earn currency by being good at the games, they have to avoid elimination, someone wins. This one has some fun mystery twists and secrets – found items that can be used on future games, but what are they and what can they do?

The first game is relatively simple, a card game, but winning isn’t solely about having the most points at the end, there are eight quests (video game style acheivements) that need to be won – some based on how well you can win the game as presented, but many of them earned by understanding implications of the rules and the apparatus to make seemingly impossible things happen. The graphical package seems very familiar if you’re into this sort of thing. Plenty of satisfying a-ha moments, and plenty of overarching mystery threads to look forward to resolving in future episodes. If you like this sort of thing – and we do – worth a look!

Great spot in the Discord, this is really funny, plenty of Taskmaster New Zealand and Australia talent involved – it’s basically comedians getting increasingly angry doing a spelling bee of variable fairness and is extremely creative within that framework. Eight episodes, starts 6th Feb. There are plenty of clips on Youtube if you want to spoil yourself.