It seems every quiz on the planet (three of them) has a Christmas cash-in book coming out so we thought we’d have a look at them. We’ve looked at the Kindle versions of each book, looking at it using the Kindle App on an iPad. This may or may not be the way the book is intended to be played or read, but we’re still waiting for a quality tablet quizmaster app so you can look like how they do it on the telly so I want to know if it works decently as a surrogate.

Also if you click through any of the links I’ll get a cut, because why not. Prices are as of at time of writing.

• The Chase: The Greatest Chases
  £11.99 Hardback
  £9.99 Kindle

  If you bought the first book and were a bit disappointed that it only included the multiple choice questions you may get on better with this one, featuring as it does effectively fifty games worth of questions, ten each against each of The Chasers. Each game includes four rounds of seven multiple choice quizzes followed by the contestant’s half of The Final Chase (with a bit of background to explain why that Chase was so memorable), around 25 questions, so you’re getting around 2,500 questions for your money written by some of the finest in the business – but be aware that they come directly from the show so if you’re a very avid viewer they may seem familiar. A pity. Also a pity is that this version seems to be a step back from the first book in terms of quizmaster fiddliness – the first book effectively had all the content printed twice, the second time with the answers in bold, deliberately designed so you could play it by yourself or with friends. This one requires you to click on links to flick to the answers (and then doesn’t give you a link back) so if you want to recreate a Final Chase it’s going to be irritating.

• Think Tank: Can You Bank On The Think Tank?
  £14.99 Hardback
  £9.99 Kindle

  A little bit of effort has gone into the layout of this one – the quizzes are interspersed with pictures of smiling Bill Turnbull and assorted Think Tank members. There are enough questions here for thirty games (interestingly I can’t work out if they’ve been directly taken from the show or not) laid out in such a fashion you can play a game *a bit* like the show – round one with the eight different reponses, round two a straight set of nine general knowledge questions, round three a set of either/or questions (if you’re playing with chums you’re encouraged to argue for an answer like the Think Tank do on the show). The fourth round are Questions: Impossible meant to be done as a head to head which looks like an amalgamation of the way the final rounds work but without the listing of the wrong answers to guide which is a bit of a confusing measure given how the rest of the book seems to ape the show pretty well. It even works quite well on Kindle, it uses links but helpfully there’s a link back with each answer (it’s not like Think Tank is a quickfire quiz anyway).

• A Pointless History Of The World
  £11.99 Hardback
  £8.99 Paperback
  £9.99 Kindle

  Right I can only claim to have flicked through this one, but after the last two money-for-old-rope books of mainly quizzes it looks like Armstrong and Osman have returned to a book style more similar to the first two – lots of humourous two-page-ish essays on aspects of history followed by a quick Pointless board or question. We may come back to flesh this out a bit later.

The world might be in a bit of a state but in the world of gameshow and competitive reality entertainment it’s probably fair to say that in primetime we’ve never had it so good. Let us return to the Bother’s Bar Board of Excitement as we explore the next week or so:

• Monday 10th – Dara O’ Briain’s Go 8 Bit – Last in the series on Dave featuring Jason Manford and Ed Byrne. You can listen to the theme and incidental tunes from compser Liam Tate on his Soundcloud if you haven’t already.
• Tuesday 11th – Taskmaster – Our current favourite show, do catch up with it on UKTV Play if you missed the first episode last week.
• Wednesday 12th – The Great British Bake Off – Tu-dorn’t want to miss this episode, it’s Tudor week!
• Thursday 13th – The Apprentice or Hunted look these are fine if you like that sort of thing but not actually that exciting.
• Friday 14th – Actually Friday’s a bit rubbish. Just go out.
• Saturday 15th – Schlag den Star! Yes! We will be back commentating over Schlag den Star next week so do come and join us. Olympic medallist Fabian Hambüchen takes on “cult comedian” Bülent Ceylan. We’ll have all the news AND the usual experimental quizziness LIVE.
• Sunday 16th – The Crystal Maze – It’s been 21 years and tonight we discover if you can film an episode at the Live Experience with some celebrities and if it’s still the best show ever.
• 

  #hostholdingaquestioncard

  Monday 17th – Rebound – Actually this is during the day but we’ll feature this here because a) we quite liked the first series and b) here’s the lovely Sean Fletcher holding a question card. Nice.

In the meantime I want to watch more foreign formats as we’ve not been doing quite so much of late so if there are shows out there you think I should watch you should definitely let me know. I’m trying to cut down on Twitter (because it’s actually not much fun these days and the cut-through is actually really bad, such is its ephemeral nature, and it means I will actually start doing useful things like reading books again) but I will still pick up your ‘at’ replies and DMs several times on a daily basis so don’t worry about that.

Here is an episode of Geh Aufs Ganze! (Go All Out! seems to be a translation) that has turned up on Youtube. It’s the German version of Let’s Make a Deal which I used to quite enjoy watching. Quite large prizes for a six-day a week early evening show if you consider £1 would have been worth around 3DM. It’s easy enough to follow if you don’t speak the language:

You know the drill, you can click for a larger version:

Meanwhile here are a collection of title sequences for Ultra Quiz. Enjoy.

And a second series one which is better but I can’t embed.

So there we are.

Well this would seem like an obvious way to build a Maze that can accomodate television cameras properly and possibly pay for itself with public involvement.