Wink Martindale’s Youtube Congolomerate released an unseen pilot yesterday called Safecrackers with Geoff Edwards, whom I’ve always quite liked. The game itself, is *sort of* clever but also *sort of* a bit tedious, but blimey the set is gorge. The safe! The use of a ratchet handle to build revelatory suspense! The completely unnecessary moving bits surounding the board! The big gate that comes down! Love it.
Ooh
Sorry, I can’t see behind the paywall but I think we can get the idea from the headline: Remarkable working to bring The Genius to Denmark and Norway.
Really interested to see how that might go. The Dutch one was fun and I’m glad it happened, but its compromises were extremely clear.
Bother’s Bar Plays Badly: The Cube on Switch
Now you can play The Cube in the safety and comfort of your own home, provided you’ve never played it on your mobile or something. How does the Switch version of The Cube compare? Does the tactility of the Joy-con make it fun? Can you work out the correct way to hold things? Are you looking forward to pulling your arms out of their sockets? Do you really enjoy watching overlong bits of film you can’t skip? Basically is it worth £35?
Sorry I wasn’t able to unlock the EXTREME ZONE, also a comedy warning for epilepsy around minute 22 which I don’t think will set anyone off but I will cover my backside.
Upcoming Thrills
It has come to my attention that the Switch The Cube game was released on Thursday just gone. I had completely forgotten about it but don’t worry I have a copy and will be doing a Plays Badly of it in the next few days. Is it worth £35 quid? Probably not, but we’ll see!
Fans of deathgame mystery dramas! Alice in Borderland series two “drops” on Netflix on December 22nd! We enjoyed series one very much and can’t quite believe it’s been two years since the first series. Thanks Juner for the heads-up.
Edit: Looks like Flemish Mole is going to Arizona, and it looks like it might be a bowing-out-whilst-on-top series like the original. I’ve been constantly amazed and impressed by the amount of new and funny ideas it’s come up with over the last almost-decade, there can’t be much in the tank left, and if they’d rather leave it before it turns crap that’s fine by me.
Vents
As you know it’s the first day of Advent and that means various chums are doing Adventy things largely on Twitter.
Daniel Peake is doing several adventy things, some puzzle related, some not, I’m going to advertise Dealvent today as I’m involved in it – it’s Deal or No Deal as an advent calendar. Follow Dealvent2022 for daily details – things will be happening in the afternoons mostly. #dealvent
Speaking of Deal or No Deal, ITV are filming two pilot episodes today in Salford. Feel free to tell me what you thought if you went and saw them.
Another point of interest is professional TV question setter Jack Yeo who is doing Wallvent (#wallvent) this year – it’s The Wall, as an advent calendar. This feels like it could be a lot of fun, the first sets of questions are already up so get cracking.
Edit: And now Daniel Hurst is doing Advent Calendar of Games!
Show Discussion: The Traitors
Right, Week One Tuesday 9:30pm, Wednesday 9:15pm, Thursday 9pm, subsequent weeks I don’t know, roll a dice or something.
BBC1The three episodes for the week go up on iPlayer after the first episode of the week. Got it? Not after week one they aren’t.
Finally Studio Lambert’s interpretation of Dutch success story De Verraders makes its way to BBC1 in a scheduling style that’s extremely confident but could yet end up being quite a long month if it doesn’t work out very well.
The Traitors is two-games-in-one really. The main narrative is basically a game of Werewolf writ large – 22 people arrive at a Scottish castle, three of them are designated Traitors, the other 19 are The Faithful. The Traitors have to work as a team to eliminate The Faithful one by one so that they outnumber them in the end and claim the money for themselves, The Faithful must eliminate The Traitors but don’t know who they can trust. Every day everyone votes to banish a member of the group out of the game, hoping to remove a Traitor. At night, the Traitors come together and “murder” a member of The Faithful – perhaps they were getting too close to the truth, perhaps they’re a useful patsy. Very different from something like The Mole, we as the audience are in on who The Traitors are and can watch them scheme as they try and outmanoeuvre the crowd.
That alone isn’t going to fill twelve hours, so in between the shouting at each other there are challenges to win up to £120,000 worth of bars of silver gold coins (because presumably the kids are too thick to understand the Judas Iscariot allegory now) and they look exciting and spectacular. Again however, differently from The Mole all contestants are pulling in the same direction – all winning surviving contestants on the winning side will share in whatever the prize pot is.
I am a bit worried as to how they’re going to square the circle of Werewolf, a game that has no fixed time limit really – it could be over in three rounds, it could be over in eleven – will be parcelled out to fit an exact twelve episode order. I know foreign versions have tended to just add more Traitors if some get eliminated early, I’m not entirely convinced the British public will just let that go if that happens here. We also have quite unusual “hunt the show” scheduling – I know they’re going big on iPlayer with this, but surely if this really takes off you want everyone to be watching the final episodes at the same time for maximum impact. They’re giving this the best possible chance – the first episode goes out after England vs Wales at the World Cup, which should be a ginormous lead-in, and getting Claudia Winkleman on board lends it an air of “you trust me on Strictly, you can trust me on this” respectability on what might feel like quite a complex show initially. Studio Lambert have done The Circle and Race Across the World, so they’ve proved they’ve got some chops in this adventure reality area. I’m hoping it’s really good, but I can’t be 100% sure it’s going to be successful. It’s done pretty well in many territories, but it’s also flopped.
Let us know what you think of the show in the comments. We currently have a Traitors Chat channel running in the Discord for episodic discussion.