Right then Gang, free Sunday night from 9pm UK? I’m hoping to be recording a Bother’s Bar Plays Badly of hit zeitgeist hidden betrayal game Among Us.

We can take up to ten players, we need at least four. You will need:

• A copy of the game – either on Steam (£3.99) or mobile (free).
• Discord, as that’s where we’ll be chatting. Join the Bother’s Bar Group – link on the right.
• A microphone.

This will be open to anyone who turns up, as I always say it’s a privilege not a right so I’ll just kick you if you’re being a nuisance/beating me. As games seem to be quite short we might get a couple in – plan for a 60-90 minute sesh – drop in and out as you please, if more than ten turn up it’ll be fastest finger with the room code. I will mute the server during gameplay and turn it on again for eviction discussion/post game grumbling/whatever. The video will go up the next day.

You don’t need to book a place, just turn up in the Bother’s Bar Among Us Discord voice chat.

If it goes well we’ll probably do a Town of Salem night in the near future (which is literally Werewolf), although probably not until after Bother’s Bar Game Night 20 on Saturday 17th October.

Well THIS might be fun. Requires 8+ people, perhaps we’ll “do” a virtual Bar trip.

Bother’s Bar Game Night 20 returns for its annual Champion of Champions on Saturday October 17th – two days after Jackbox 7 gets released.

As it stands, most of the previous champions during the last year can make it (including you, Team Audience!), however there’s one person who might not be able to make it lockdown permitting so I’m giving myself plenty of time for contingency.

Have you been or are you a champion at anything? Or is there something you’ve hilariously failed at? And will you be free to play from 9-11:30ish on October 17th? Get in touch.

Thanks to Luke S for alerting us to this in the comments, Netflix have a singing gameshow called Sing On, co-created by Friend Of The Bar Stuart Shawcross (they’ve actually got a couple of foreign language versions which have been on for a few weeks, but the English language one started recently). It’s Singstar meets Weakest Link effectively, six singers add money to a group pot by hitting notes correctly on some well chosen karaoke classics, for the first three rounds they each vote someone off (with immunity for the person who did the best), final rounds eliminate the voting and it’s solely decided by the computer judge, winner wins the pot (up to $60,000).

Being America, everyone basically goes straight for the throats of the competition from the off (which suggests the money needs rebalancing a bit), but it’s light and decently entertaining, lots of shouting and mugging to the camera effrevesence from host Titus Burgess, decent upbeat tune selection. Think I’d prefer a running cash total for the song as the notes are hit as the demo seems to suggest but there we are.

And just thirteen years after Ben Shephard/Denise Van Outen sung for SAM on Who Dares Sings.

We wrote about our possible misgivings with the upcoming US Weakest Link last week – basically it looks very pretty, Jane Lynch ought to be excellent, but they’ve added gameplay elements that look like they solve some issues but may have opened up several more, then Buzzerblog posted this:

Urgh. We have an early round with a chain that basically encourages banking after each question (great TV!) and a slightly later round that’s, frankly, slow as anything to get going. We always thought the US chain sucked and this isn’t doing anything to allay our fears.

Weakest Link UK always had a similar issue, in that in having so many players they have to bulk out the chain in such a way that by step four, your rate of change is increasing but your return on investment makes it less worthwhile not to bank. However, by accident or design, the chains held to a standard, four questions in a row = 20% of the target. Everything up to that point is always worth the gamble, 20% feels like a decent chunk (even if in reality it’s £200). As a game, the chain made much more sense starting with seven players as they eventually experimented with (2%, 4%, 10%, 20%, 40%, 70%, 100%) but as an elimination game it’s more of an entertaining journey with nine.

You can argue that these US chains make it much more worthwhile to go for it. And you’re right. Except have you considered how likely that is? Let us consider that if the probably of getting a question right is 90% – that’s easier than Tipping Point – then the probability of getting eight questions in a row correct, assuming nobody banks, is 43%. If you up the difficulty to 80% chance (consider the sort of Pointless questions which get around 80), that drops to 17%. More likely the difficulty will be around 70% or lower, and the chance of getting eight in a row here is 6%. So more likely than not, very little gets banked and we’re actually in not much better a position than the original show where of the million dollars on offer people took home about $30,000. Except now it looks more generous, but the prize pot probably ends up at being about a dime. Now the show has to work really hard not to be seen as a waste of time.

This is of course all theory but we won’t have to wait long to see how it all shakes down in practice.