Trying out some new stuff, here’s a video of me playing new poker-roguelike Balatro which is not gameshow related but if I know my audience I think it’s likely to be of interest. It’s out on all the major platforms, and it’s £13 at time of writing.

New system (I’m moving to OBS having done years on XSplit), still haven’t got the background music *quite* right, a bit too low if you listen to it through speakers, although it’s better in headphones. Anyway, I’m hoping to record an exciting BRAND NEW FORMAT that’s been going around my head for a while for Bother’s Bar’s twentieth birthday in April, or perhaps I will be lazy and not bother, who knows?

Is it John McEnroe’s chair? Probably not.

Is it the Mastermind Chair? Naah.

Is it the seat from Tout le monde veut prendre sa place? Nah.

It’s David Jensen’s wicked robotic seat from World Wise. Who doesn’t fancy a go on this? 1985, never been bettered. Which is sad really.

Keep an eye on that Made in Maidstone Youtube channel, it’s only been going a few weeks and they’ve been uploading lots of interesting stuff from the Southern/TVS archives and as that’s the region I lived in until I was 11 it’s the best one, Ed Welch station theme and all.

Fans of surprise breakout hit and watching-things-happen-multiple-times-but-from-different-angles, Physical 100: Underground, season two of the physically demanding Really Nicely Korean Produced Mysterious Voice Guided Elimination Game, starts dropping on Netflix from March 19th. We really enjoyed the first series.

This is our future for the next two or three years isn’t it? ‘X… but with a traitor mechanic.’ The Chosen Ten sounds a bit like ‘The Question Jury… but with a traitor mechanic’. Was extremely tempted to title this post “Unantenmous” as an in-joke for longer-term readers.

I am absolutely fascinated by this, The CheapShow podcast are doing an episode on the original Gladiators board game and I’m trying to work out how the hell I missed this as a twelve year old or whatever. At that sort of age I’d have absolutely scoured the toys and games bit of the Argos catalogue/John Moores catalogue/Kays catalogue/whatever my Mum was using at the time and I don’t remember this at all, because if I did I would have begged to get it for Christmas.

I was well aware of the action figure game sets they would go on to release later (and they wouldn’t have held quite the same appeal for me) but even so. Even looking back at old retrospectives I don’t think I’ve seen anyone refer to it.

Have you ever been surprised to discover gameshow merch?

Or a weekend anyway.

First of all this weekend, Holger on the Discord will be streaming the latest series of Wer stiehlt mir die show? variously live on Sunday nights (from tomorrow) or delayed on Tuesday nights going forward (check the Events Tab in the Discord for dates). Who’s Stealing The Show is basically the German answer to the question “what if you gave House of Games a big budget, and had each week’s winner present the next show?” and is extremely inventive and fun, this series, which is always helmed by Joko out of Joko & Klaas, features Klaas out of Joko & Klaas as one of the regular contestants, as well as Lena out of Eurovision.

But what are you doing March 16th? Well FOTB and modern-day Chris Goss Ben Lathbury AKA Persephone’s Chair AKA Royal Flush is running his 400th Game Night, except it’s another charity marathon one where he goes through all of his interactive Twitch formats and this time he’s raising money for CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), here’s the line-up:

It’s all good, although that final quarter in particular looks unmissable, big fan of The Escape Artist and Dangerzone as quiz formats, although I’m intrigued to find out what the Guest Games are, and how long it will all overrun. If you want a taster, Ben usually streams on Saturday nights from 8pm on Twitch and you can playalong in the chat and on your phone these days.

Finally apropos of nothing other than a lot of people have requested it over a little while, I’ve uploaded the entire series of BBC 3’s 2004 espionage crash course reality competition Spy to Youtube. It’s unlisted (for now) but not private especially, but having had the channel copyright banned once already many years ago I’m extremely wary of it happening again, as such don’t get overexcited about the possibility of more, we’ll see how this goes, think of it as an early 20th Anniversary Of The Bar present. The quality’s not amazing, sorry.