Right, this arrived on Wednesday from WH Smiths (I know! In 2018!). Rollout is going to department stores first before going bigger. I’ve not had a chance to play it yet but don’t let that stop me from telling you about it.

Do you remember how the original board game from twenty years ago took years to set up, then you’d catapult a boulder under the settee and never get the industrial crane to work?

Well look at all this stuff.

That’s a lot of stuff. I’d suggest it’s actually not quite as imaginative as the first game but it’s a bit easier to set up.

The main board is double sided, with the maze element on one side and the dome on the other. Two teams play and it’s recommended you have a separate Mazemaster, although you can master for the other team if you want. The Mazemaster gets a lovely manual, detailing all of the games. There’s also a Timer App you can download, if you want something a bit fancier than the two minute egg timer provided.

Teams pick a zone and take it in turns to select one of the four challenges within. Each team also gets an ALIS card they can play on their opponents once if they think they will fail the challenge. The games range from quite small scale mental tests – word puzzles, riddles, circuits, to quite large scale physicals and mysteries (two of which involve some sort of treasure hunt around the entire and preferably different room, and involve some setting up with the contestants outside. Each of the mental games has between five and ten starting configurations for replayability.

For The Dome, a bunch of cards are placed face down spread across the board, you use the hands with the suckers to remove them from the table in the time earned. You may look under the card to determine its colour before it leaves the board at your own discretion.

And that’s it really. No idea how well it works in practice because I haven’t played it yet. In theory it seems quite nice though. We’ll do another review of it when we’ve actually managed to play it, as it is right now it’s not easy to find a copy of anyway.

Jackbox 5 is officially out on all major digital platforms which means Bother’s Bar’s Game Night 12: Champignon of Champignons will be LIVE this Saturday night from 9pm, for you to play along with all the new games. You Don’t Know Jack, Split the Room, Mad Verse City, Patently Stupid and Zeeple Dome will get a play in some capacity, and if there’s time maybe some Quiplash and Fibbage.

But have you ever wondered just who is the most successful Game Night panellist of all time is? Well wonder no longer as I semi-distractedly totted up some things last night (including awarding points and victories from early episodes when there wasn’t really a format), and THIS is what I’ve found.

Absolutely fascinating. People in red are the panellists for this weekend. As we can see our very own anti-Alan Davies Matt Clemson is top of the pile with three absolute victories, one of which was quite lucky because the first one was just awarded to him despite, in hindsight and with the current scoring system, actually tying with Andrew Warren in Game Night 1 (so they’ve both been awarded moral victories). And there was one episodes were only four games were played, where typically 6-7 will get played before the arbitrary final, but still. Incredible Average Points per Appearance from Chris Field and David Bodycombe who haven’t quite been so successful in coverting to PROPER WINS. Also of note: Alex Richards has been docked an ABSOLUTE VICTORY as the tape shows the final of GN11 didn’t go quite as planned.

If YOU want to find yourself on the scoreboard, Festive Game Night happens in the middle of December. But for now, join us Saturday!

Television has frankly been a boring recently and I find myself watching less than I used to (and if MIPCOM is anything to go by this week, this may well be a continuing trend). I have instead found myself videogaming a lot more recently and pondering what if anything can be learned.

For some reason I had a hankering to play a hidden object puzzle adventure game towards the back end of last week and I asked on Twitter for suggestions and thanks very much for those that did. A hidden object game is as it says – you get a busy scene with typically lots of objects in it and a list of objects, your job is to find the specific objects in the scene, and then you can move on to the next bit of the narrative. If you get stuck you can normally ask for a certain amount of hints and sometimes you’ll be against the clock.

I tried two games, one on recommendation and one as a punt. The first one, Madame Fate, part of the Mystery Case Files series (you can buy on Steam) is getting on for around ten years old and unfortunately feels that way, playing in a fairly small box on modern monitor resolutions, which makes the act of trying to find hidden objects in detailed scenes that much harder. This one has a carnival setting and a story involving finding lots of objects to stop a murder and thus is against the clock. Nicely you get several scenes you can jump between if you get stuck and there’s even some light puzzling elements (make ten words out of these letters, for example). Unfortunately I’m a bit rubbish at it.

Slightly more involved I played Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride on PS4 from Polish hidden object specialists Artifex Mundi (£11.99 at time of writing). The graphics, video and acting are not much to shout about, but there are a couple of things that made it lightly entertaining. It’s more of an adventure game in that you need to examine objects and use them on other objects to release other objects that are useful down the line – but it’s set up so that you’re not more than about three screens away from a place you’re meant to use an object – we’re not talking Monkey Island levels of difficulty, it’s mainly unusual key looking for unusual lock. Frequently you will have puzzles to solve that are to be frank not difficult (it’s not The 7th Guest), but mechanical enough that solving them is a dopamine hit. There are hidden object scenes where you might need to figure out combinations of objects (to get a gold candlestick, you find a brush, paint and paint it) or find bits of object that fit to make something useful, and whatsmore you can skip hidden object scenes entirely and instead take on a domino task. I probably got 6-8 hours out of it, and if it was a gameshow it would be something gently entertaining like Brainteaser.

I don’t know how far down the hole I’ll end up going. Here is basically the TV version of it:

This is interesting, FOTB James Wallace who we posted a thing about sometime ago has gone live with his new blog, Mr Babbage’s Lock Up, which looks at the technology behind the technology of various bits of gameshow equipment and related things. Go and have a look, right now various interesting articles about things like the graphics from Catchphrase and how the displays on Family Fortunes (i.e. Mr Babbage) worked.

In other news, @davemadeatweet has revealed that Dave Made a Maze, a film that looks set to get straight to the heart of Bother’s Bar’s Film Club, is getting a UK release in January.

Remember! It’s BBGNXII: Champigion of Champignons on Saturday night! Jackbox 5 releases on most platforms on Wednesday.

Finally a big thanks to everyone who has left a tip over the last month, much appreciated. If you’re buying anything from Amazon.co.uk, doing it via the link on the sidebar (or here) gives us a small cut.

This might be quite fun, hats off to Buzzerblog for noticing that LostinTV are advertising for a Channel 5 show that sounds awfully like Hollywood Game Night.

Monkey Kingdom, the production company behind ‘TFI Friday’ and ‘Made in Chelsea’ are making a brand new game show for Channel 5.

The show features two teams of celebrity guests playing hilarious games that test pop culture knowledge, acting skills, and nerves of steel. There will also be performances from our studio band!

This exciting programme is based on a successful global game show, so you won’t want to miss out!

We quite like HGN (we wrote a little bit about it in the past), although rather suspect the level of celebrity for this might be quite low. Still, if you’re interested, it’s filming at Elstree at the end of the month. I can’t go but if anyone can do let us know what you think. Or even if it actually is Borehamwood Game Night.

We’ve been alerted to the fact that the new Crystal Maze board game has begun its slow roll-out and you can buy it from WH Smiths for £28. KEEP ‘EM PEELED.

It’s meant to be coming to bigger retailers in due course.