This Saturday FOTB Royal_Flu$h is hosting a 12+ hour interactive quiz charity stream on his channel with all his own massively multiplayer quiz formats to play live with, several editions of Deal or No Deal and crucially, a celebrity edition of his new game Face/Off at 9pm starring noneother than Dan Peake, Paul Farrer, Lucy Porter and Tom Scott. All proceeds raised go to Samaritans.

I’ll be dipping in and out all day as time permits. The twitch channel is here.

You can donate through Tiltify.

Delighted this morning to see a high quality (also the very last) episode of Hughie Green’s The Sky’s The Limit on Youtube this morning. It very much feels like the end of an Ultra Quiz style contest with a final challenge that’s a bit underwhelming (who are these contestants? Who knows!) and whilst they’re digging Green interviews people around the island and asks them questions for cash. The contestants aren’t the only thing that’s digging, right, because I quite dig the theme tune. Do give Cleops a follow on Youtube, they put up some great entertainment archival stuff.

Also some NEW CONTENT on BrigBox:

Sunday, 8pm,
Here and on Youtube

Award season is about to start and we’re getting the jump with Bother’s Bar’s Award Winning Game Night! We’re rolling out the red carpet for our seven panellists – and Team Audience – as we see what you voted the best Jackbox games in six categories as well as finding out which Arbitrary Final is going to get a second outing. Who will end up winning tonight’s award for Actual Victor?

You as Team Audience of course get the chance to win for yourselves, playalong on jackbox.tv and in the Youtube Chat and during the back half of the night we will need Voices of the Audience for the Best Improvisation Game and Best Social Deduction Game categories, and possibly the Best Arbitrary Final. You will need a mic and we need to be friends on Discord for me to invite you on (I’m BrigBother #9399 – send request in advance).

This is very good, and also factual:

Join us for Bother’s Bar’s Award Winning Game Night tomorrow from 8pm!

This started on SBS6 in the Netherlands last night, if you are knowledgeable in the VPN Dark Arts you can watch it here, I’m afraid there’s not much on Youtube right now but here are the titles:

We have a long-running ‘joke’ at Bother’s Bar about our own format The Road to Sortition, a quiz version of marble racing, the greatest untapped format in the last ten years do call us, so we were surprised and interested to see that John De Mol has got there first. Marble racing is brilliant, effectively they’re just lotteries but the draw machines (the courses, if you will) make them compelling for minutes at a time. We don’t need draw machine Merlin, physics is its own kind of magic, right gang? We’re also interested to learn that Jelle of popular Youtube channel Jelle’s Marble Runs is involved in this.

Three celebs battle it out for €30,000 for charity. They’ll play three games to earn marbles for three courses, and positioning well on those courses gives you an advantage in the final run.

By far and away the weakest element of the show is these Small Fortune-esque minigames. Really there’s only so much you can dress up rolling marbles by hand – in the first episode we have trying to roll a marble into a goal whilst the opponents roll their own marble to block, hitting perspex letters, and probably the best one marble curling. They’re not especially compelling, and if they weren’t being played by naturally competitive people (ex-footballers yesterday) would barely qualify as television.

Winning each event earns three marbles in the race, second two and third one (if there’s a tie, they do a shootout on a brick surface to determine positions) and this is where the show comes to life a bit, with rather excellent looking marble race courses, each with its own theme (A Funfair! Outside! A Carwash!) which they’ve gone to town on both in terms of dressing up and in terms of having relevant obstacles (A Ferris Wheel! A Test-your-strength Hammer! A Merry-go-round! A Carwash! Foam!) Each marble scores 0-5 points for its owner depending on which position it finishes the race in.

In the final, 6,000 marbles are poured into the machine (3,000 for the person with the most points, 2,000 for second, 1,000 for third). These then race down a massive track, mixing up, until they get to a choke point – the first 100 marbles go in one bin, the second 100 in a second and a third 100 in a third, the rest are discarded. These marbles race down quite a slow spiral slope, ending with a few mechanical obstacles, for the money – the marbles in bin 3 race for €5,000, bin 2 €10,000 and finally bin one for €15,000. For me the first part of the final lacks the lots-of-marbles-doing-a-thing interest that videos might have, and the second part of the final is surprisingly low intensity considering.

So the marble racing element is strong in the main, other elements not so. There’s a virtual audience stadium around the whole thing which is quite fun and the whole thing feels a little bit like a fever dream. Interested to see who de Mol sells it to over here, inevitably.