Wednesdays, 8:25pm
S4C and iPlayer
Well how’s that? Literally minutes after posting that there’s nothing happening I’m alerted to the fact Slam Television’s Y Deis launched on S4C last night, and you can watch it with English subs on iPlayer.
This caught us off guard a bit as a press release announcing the show and its Irish version only came out quite recently, I hadn’t realised it was ready to go, so here we are. Teams use strategy and the luck of the dice to pick questions seems to be the basic idea.
I look forward to watching it later, but if you have watched it let us know what you think in the comments.
This was *fine*. The biggest criticisms I could make, other than the stakes not really being very exciting, is that the quick shot cutting during the dice spins was quite annoying – I’m 44 now. I’m not sure about the steal power in round two, it feels like an interesting potential decision in the first run but not really a decision in the second run – it’s either going to be obviously worth taking or obviously not worth taking, and the odds of hitting a repeat square don’t feel very high because of how few questions are involved really, but that’s quite hard to balance given that if there *were* more holes on the board you’re probably chasing an increasingly small return on your stake. Don’t know.
I can’t help but think the endgame should *end* with a roll of the dice, I’ll be intrigued to find out how many episodes have finals that feel reasonably close and exciting.
It feels solidly produced.
Might as well give the format run-down.
3 pairs of contestants stand at podia to the left of the rather nice-looking set, the host stands to the right side and in the centre is a large cage with 2 dice, one red and one white. In Round 1, the dice are rolled and their value is how many steps the associated question is worth. The first 2 teams to each collect 18 steps go through to the next round. Questions in this round are straight=up questions on the buzzer.
Round 2 and things get strategic. Each team is spotted £120 and a 6×6 matrix is shown on a large video wall at the back of the set. The dice determine the value of each question from £40 to £200. The rarer the roll, the more money it’s worth (e.g. a roll of any combination that gives a total of 7 is worth £40, while a double 1 or a double 6 are the rarest rolls, so they’re worth £200). Each team gets 2 opportunities to get as much as they can, but once a question has been answered on a particular roll, that square is then blanked out and landing on it again wipes out their ‘wallet’ and ends the turn. Questions in this round are now 4-answer multiple choice questions, an incorrect answer also wiping out the wallet and ending the turn. 3 squares on the matrix are randomly lit up in gold. Landing on one of these allows the pair to steal half their opponent’s bank at the cost of ending their turn. The team with the most money go through to the Final, while the losing pair get Y Deis…fluffy dice as a consolation prize.
In the Final, each member of the winning pair rolls the dice, the result being multiplied by £100 (doubled if a double is rolled) and added together to form their jackpot. They have 3 minutes to answer alternate 2-answer multiple choice questions and each light a 6-step path. A correct answer puts them forward a step while a wrong answer puts them back a step. If one of them has already made it to the end of their path, they must still answer questions correctly until their partner joins them.
One of the more fun new formats of recent times, the ‘variable points ladder’ frontgame reminds me of the ‘one, two or three point question’ bit on Going for Gold, though I’m not sure whether higher rolls had an impact on the difficulty of the question here (maybe they should, I’m not certain).
Grid game is good for strategy as players themselves have to decide the optimum time to build or bank, show 1 wasn’t perhaps the best example of the concept as ultimately only the second roll around mattered, but there’s a good concept here and it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out as we go along.
Not so worried about the title dice taking a back seat in the final as being all-questions means the players properly earn their jackpot, rather than a poor team rewarded by good luck or a strong team penalised by a poor spin (although that technically could be the case in the earlier rounds).
In all a pretty solid format, we’ll have to see if its tendrils extend beyond the Celtic broadcasters in the way The Lie and Wonderball sadly couldn’t – it’d perhaps fit nicely in the half-seven slot ITV has opening up in the new year (Millionaire Hotseat and the restyled Celebrity Lingo also apparently going there)
Two episodes in and I’m digging how it works.
If if was to air in the English language and be shown on Channel Four UK or on the BBC, I’d increase the money amounts as it would be players from across the country rather than one quarter of it.
I’d also change up the Final so that if only one person is at the finish line at the end of the 3 minutes, they win half of the Jackpot.