Saturday, 9pm (GMT),
Here and on Youtube.

Join in! Play along on jackbox.tv

We’re back for the 18th Game Night! And this episode’s loose theme is “games we’ve not played for a while + Trivia Murder Party 2“, whether through the unluckiness of the board pick or not fitting the narrative we’ve basically made up to justify playing.

As ever SEVEN panellists are vying for domination whilst YOU, Team Audience, will be doing your best to stop them, so get your phone out and play along with the room codes on screen, and chat along in the Youtube chat.

I’ve also got what in my head might be the best Arbitrary Final yet. If you can’t make it earlier, join us around 11:15pm for that.

And to counteract the Swedish Eurovision National Final we’ll be clashing with, we’ve gone ALL OUT with A REALLY SEXY (and quite expensive) SET OF FONTS.

You will not want to miss it!

Thanks to the Friend of the Bar who alerted me to this: a full episode of La Tresor de Pago Pago, TF1’s answer to Fort Boyard by some of the people behind Fort Boyard. It has a Russian (?) commentary track, but don’t let that stop you.

Three couples compete across three stages, at the end of the first two the worst performers are eliminated. The first stage is your typical adventure racing stuff (kayaking, net climbing, crossing a swamp). The second takes place in the village of Pago Pago (*), where the villagers protect the legendary pearl treasure and our contestants must prove themselves worthy in a number of village-y things (not flinching whilst having an arrow shot at you, bamboo dancing, sumo wrestling, being locked in a basket and thrown underwater). The winning team then get thirty minutes to complete underwater challenges, hampered by resident freediving pirates who want the treasure for themselves, to find a combination to a padlock which blocks the domed grotto containing the pearls, and earn bracelets which can be exchanged for using breathing apparatus held by the treasure’s topless guardians when collecting said pearls.

It’s certainly a bit of a curio, running for 11 episodes on TF1 across two runs – we’re aware there was a German version as well (Edit: actually might have crossed wires there). We quite like the Vangelis-style soundtrack, but there’s not much of it. Ultimately it suffers from Ice Warriors syndrome – there’s only so many ways you can dress up doing stuff underwater really, although it frequently looks gorgeous.

(*) There is in fact an actual village of Pago Pago in American Samoa, but this was filmed in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Putting this here mainly as a reminder to me to look into it in the next few days, I was alerted to this on Twitter last night:

Sounds intriguing and Very Much The Sort Of Thing We Like, although I’m interested to see how it goes down – the challenges would need to be very strong as it’d be quite difficult to start following and picking favourite contestants out of so many. Or is it? It’s on SBS6 in the Netherlands if anyone wants to have a look before I do (or indeed even after).

Not quite sure if it’s worth its own follow-up post to the original S1 one, but the first of two Sport Relief specials airs this evening from 8:30pm. I don’t know if S2 proper is following straight after this mini-run or what. As we’ve said previously, as a 30 minute light shoulder-peak snack it was surprisingly quite good, whether it will work in a slightly longer slot in the middle of primetime remains to be seen.

Next Saturday (7th March) we open up our doors again for another Game Night and I’m looking for panellists. We’ll be deliberately playing games that for one reason or another haven’t had many run outs of late (although we’ll undoubtably find an excuse for Trivia Murder Party 2 at some point).

If you’re:

• Free next Saturday night from around 8:50pm-11:30pm GMT,
• Have a microphone,
• Have a Discord account

You could be one of my seven panellists. Whatsmore, I will be needing a Voice Of The Audience for this episode’s exciting Arbitrary Final.

If you’re interested, please leave a comment here OR DM me on Twitter (please don’t just reply to a Tweet, it’ll likely get forgotten about when I come to putting a panel together). New panellists are encouraged.

Importantly, as we’ll be doing it through Discord direct messages, we will need to be friends on Discord. If we’re not then add me (I am BrigBother #9399) or leave your details and I’ll add you. Adding is no guarantee of selection, there are many considerations when it comes to putting together a panel. i’d like to be able to put the panel together on Thursday night, so I will let successful applicants know then.

Thanks and good luck!