Tonight, 8pm – 10:30ish
Here and on Youtube

It’s that time of year again! A new Jackbox Party Pack has been released, and the prize for winning a Game Night is first dibs on the new games. Join us from 8pm as all the previous champions from the year (except for one who’s going to be at the World Minigolf Championships) compete for the ultimate accolade: Champion of Champions.

We’ll also be joined by some super special guests I’ve invited to fill up the numbers, as Team Audience has had a great year. And as ever Team Audience will be competing tonight to ruin the hopes and dreams of our panel, so get your phones and tablets ready. It’s like real life Squid Game!

One winner will get to see the light in the Arbitrary Final from around 10pm, where anything can and might happen! You won’t want to miss it!

I’ve just watched the first episode of Baking Impossible on Netflix and it was quite good – kind of like Scrapheap Challenge but with cake. Nine teams of “bakeneers” (one’s a baker, one’s an engineer, the first time they meet each other is on set) are charged with engineering mission they have to bake their way around – the first one involves building a boat that could cross a 20ft “sea” whilst being buffeted by light wind from some fans within a 45 second time limit. The resident panel of judges, led by Andrew the engineering one off of Bake Off a few years ago, judge the teams on engineering, whether the cake it was carrying was any good and “bakeneering”.

My one issue I think is that surely judging a cake (which got no screen time at all in the making bit) that’s being carried across is a cop out – they should be tasting the boat, surely? Otherwise it’s standard episodic elimination, but with the mission winners getting an advantage for the next mission. It’s quite fun – magician Justin Willman is a decent host. Worth a watch.

Have quite enjoyed comments suggesting the set looks like a Mint Wispa.

Bad timing! If it wasn’t for Jackbox 8 coming out the same day (Thursday) and that I’ve a Game Night to prepare for this Sunday, I rather suspect there’d be a video for the upcoming Koh-Lanta game published – of course! – by Microids.

It’s coming out on all the big systems – XBox, PS4, Switch and promises “over 10 challenging trials directly inspired from the TV show and over 10 survival mini-games to live the ”real” Koh-Lanta experience”. It’s French Survivor.

Luckily! I’m off work next week petsitting, which seems like as good an opportunity as any to make a video, so hopefully you can wait until then.

That’s right, join us as last year’s Game Night Champions – and some special guests – compete across the new Jackbox suite of games out on Thursday and an incredible high concept Arbitrary Final. YOU are invited to join in as Team Audience, rightful champions of the last year in your own right.

Why not pretend it’s like Real Life Squid Game, like everything else is right now? I’m not planning on killing the losers but formats can change between paper and screen.

The fun starts Sunday at 8pm UK and ends approximately 10:30pm. Bring your phones!

In other news I watched the rebooted Legends of the Hidden Temple on The CW (pretty easy to do with the Dark Arts). They’ve made a great kids show, but tonally I think the wholesomeness – ironic or otherwise – works against it in an adult format. I also think the Temple Run was a bit inelegantly filmed, it’s not always easy to follow the tasks in the Temple itself, and it really ought to have been filmed at night with torches ideally. It flopped pretty big on premiere although I suspect might have done a bit better if it was on Netflix or something rather than linear TV where it might have got more written thinkpieces. The interesting thing is that people who were old enough to watch LotHT first time round (1993-95) are now more likely than not outside the 18-34 target demo now. Which is terrifying.