With Christmas only (checks) two-and-a-bit months away, it’s time to take stock of all the new cash-in stuff out and coming out for the gameshow fan in YOUR life looking for a gift.

Links are to Amazon unless otherwise stated and I get a small cut if you order through them, although feel free to buy elsewhere. We’re concentrating on new stuff released this year. Prices are correct at time of writing. If we’re missing anything let us know in the comments and we’ll add it in later. So without further ado…

BOARD GAMES

Taskmaster
£20 at John Lewis

Let’s start as we mean to go on with the Taskmaster board game not actually available at Amazon for the moment, which could be very good but also possibly a lot of effort for after Xmas dinner shenanigans.

Video tasks from Alex Horne promised!

Tenable
£24.95 at Amazon

Warwick Davies’ game of Top Ten lists, now in board game form. Amazon are also selling this from another supplier for £40. Don’t buy that one, would be my advice.

The Crystal Maze Eastern Expansion
£15.65 from Amazon

Smart addition to the The Crystal Maze board game that you can also play it in its own right. We don’t know how many challenges it comes with and can’t find any info either – could be four, could be eight (would hope it’s the latter).

Interesting to see if they attempt others/refreshes if this sells well.

BOOKS

Richard Osman’s House of Games
£10.99 Hardback, £7.99 Kindle

Featuring 101 “classic and brand new” games from the hit TV show. I’d like to write more but it’s not coming out until tomorrow.

Only Connect’s Difficult Second Quiz Book
£10.11 Hardback, £7.99 Kindle

That’s a clever title isn’t it? Because it references the idea of the difficult second album, and that the questions contained therein are difficult. I bet Victoria mentions that in her foreword.

Anyway here are 200 more questions, “including many never-before-broadcast and all-new ones exclusive to the book.”

Taskmaster: 200 220 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People
£7.19 Paperback, £6.49 Kindle

Why’s this here? Because the new paperback printing has twenty more tasks in it, and presumably no/newer/fewer references to things like the Taskmaster picnic that happened earlier this year.

The Chase 10th Anniversary Quiz Book
£10.49 Hardback, £9.99 Kindle

Celebrate 10 years of The Chase with a quiz book with over 2000 questions and lots of behind the scenes trivia and info.

TERRIFYING FACE MASKS

Now you too can pretend to be the Taskmaster (and Taskmaster’s assistant) with these terrifying face masks! Each one is £2.97 (click to be taken through) and I’ve hidden them behind a cut in case they scare you.

Continue reading →

Banijay show spotted on SRO:

Have you triumphed against the odds?

Or stared hardship in the face and won?

Then this is the challenge for you! We’re making an epic game show for the toughest competitors that have ever lived…the survivors of modern life.

Whatever your story, we want to hear it and send you to an exotic location to compete for a life changing amount of money, that isn’t for sharing.

All you have to do now is have a game plan!

Contact us now for more information. More details on the programme will be provided on application but please think along the lines of Castaway meets Last Man Standing.

We can’t be 100% as there’s been no announcement or anything, but this couldn’t sound more like Survivor if it tried, could it? Banijay have the rights and everything.

In other news, remember to join us on Saturday night for Bother’s Bar’s Jackbox 6 Game Night, where previous champions will battle it out across ALL NEW games!

ITV Press release for this just come out, will be going out in the run-up to Halloween.

It very much sounds like The Sort Of Thing We Like. In fact we were talking about it in a previous thread.

Seems as good a reason as any for a video of 13: Fear Is Real, which was basically Werewolf with a horror-themed reality twist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0utGgxmty6s&t=4s

This was cancelled after one season, airing on The CW in 2009. It’s mildly entertaining, especially if horror movies are your thing (Sam Raimi’s an exec producer).

So here is a new thing, and by “new” I mean “there’s been six of them but I had no idea existed until they followed me on Twitter yesterday,” a podcast from Global Radio that exists only as a podcast called The Birthday Game with Richard Osman, and made by Remarkable Television (relevant links here, or you could just search for it in your podcast aggregator of choice).

In it, three guests try to guess the ages of celebs who have birthdays in the week of broadcast. Three points for dead on, one point for being a year out, winner wins a Colin the Caterpillar cake from M and S.

That’s it. It’s amiable enough, I’m 2.5 episodes in and it’s fine, enjoyment depends largely on the quality of guests they’ve got on – there’s plenty of time for small talk (indeed you should probably go into it with the mindset it’s some celebs having a chat and playing a game than the other way round). It’s a three-minute local radio feature turned into a 40 minute podcast, basically.

It’s hard enough to get people to watch light entertainment on TV these days, this is an intriguing content strategy from Endemol, in a medium you actively have to seek out. Not quite sure what it’s for (it’s not like any of the people involved need to have a podcast. Is it meant to be a loss leader? A loss leader for what exactly?) or what counts as success (@birthdaygamepod at time of writing has… 105 followers). In fact I can’t think of any quizzy or gameshowy podcasts that have properly broken out at all, off the top of my head.