‘Card’ Games

[Torgo]

I know lots of people that can't wrap their heads around blackjack. Even though I love Hit Me, I can see how knowledge of a different, unrelated game shouldn't serve as a pre-requisite for a pricing game.

(Hole in One requires golf, but any dingus can figure out "ball in hole go brrrrrrrrr".)

[JhayPrice]

Poker Game haven't survived due to the low payouts during its last years. To this day I still wonder why it can't be played with the 4-digit prizes, as they could revert to the original rules of selecting the 5 numbers from their 6-8-digit hand.

[theamazingracer]

If "math is hard" was the real excuse, we wouldn't have added Vend-O-Price (which has absorbed the "estimate how much multiples of this grocery cost" concept), Do the Math, or Pay the Rent in the past ten years.

Poker Game's easy fix would simply be using six SPs and having the player pick three. You'd still have the same issue with people (Drew) not understanding poker, but that could be fixed with a sign like the Punch-a-Bunch legend or something, and it's much easier to pick out a prize that's in the $89-$99 range than it is to pick something that's $x99.

Stack the Deck is a card-themed game but not a card-based game (though to be fair, so was Joker). I don't mind that it's very hard when the prize is a car, but the problem is "very hard" becomes "nigh on impossible" when they don't win all three digits. It'd become so much more tolerable if they just gave them a free digit like most of the other car games do - winning all three picks would then make it a 1/3 shot at the car, but then they'd also have the leeway to be less forgiving with the grocery portion of they wanted it to be lost.

[gamesurf]

Poker Game haven't survived due to the low payouts during its last years. To this day I still wonder why it can't be played with the 4-digit prizes, as they could revert to the original rules of selecting the 5 numbers from their 6-8-digit hand.

I've often thought Poker Game could be modified to be played with grocery products for a prize package or a trip.

These aren’t bad fixes, but they don’t address Poker Game’s biggest problem: it’s a guessing game disguised as a pricing game. “Pick a price with nines in it” isn’t a very helpful goal, whether you’re playing with an $899 treadmill, an $1,899 computer, or an $8.99 vitamin supplement.

Amazingracer’s fix is probably the best one I’ve heard yet.

I don’t understand how Hit Me was so confusing. It’s basic multiplication and division. Even under the lights it shouldn’t be hard to understand.

Under the lights, even “where are you from and what do you do” can be a daunting question.

Bob’s explanation probably didn’t help matters. Listen to the first 60 seconds of how Bob explains the game. He spends 50 seconds setting up the blackjack elements of the game using fancy words the contestant doesn’t understand. By the time Bob starts mentioning the grocery items and the multiplication aspect, the contestant is already long lost.

Vend-o-Price has the benefit of having its presentation focused completely around the multiplication aspect. There’s nothing to distract the contestant.

[Shaymin]

Poker Game is still doable, but the stakes would have to be raised to make sure the game fits the $5000 or more pricing game budget. The major problem is that a person has to know what Poker hands are better than which, and I can understand if that would confuse the contestant, or more importantly Drew.

The contestants would be a concern, but Drew wrote a short story about playing poker in Vegas in his pre-Price days and has a good mind for trivia so I'm not as worried if the powers that be come up with a poker-themed game.

[actual_retail_tice]

I'd love to see the "Hit Me is easy for ME to understand, so nobody ELSE should have a problem!!" discourse go away. There's so many reasons why that's wrong. Yes, I think it was easy to understand to those of us who watched every week for years and saw it played dozens of times. But to me, the whole "right-price-multiplied-by-something" explanation was never easy to explain or understand in the heat of the moment. If you add on top of that the contestant not knowing Blackjack, the game becomes "Well...just point at different prices and maybe you'll win." And that was with Bob doing his level best to explain the game precisely. Drew always seems to be in a hurry to get the boring, explain-y parts over with, so I would bet things would go over worse if Hit Me were still being played.

I still sometimes try to come up with better ways to explain Poker Game strategy than "Try to find 9s", which I'll say is probably Bob's worst game explanation and it survived for decades. I think it should have gone "Oh, you don't know how to play poker? Well, on our show, we play it with the numbers in the prices of those prizes. The way to win is to get the most matching numbers. High numbers are best because they beat lower numbers. So, for now, pick any prize, we'll see the price, and you can pick another you think has the same numbers."

Both these games have a bad trait, which is that they take so much longer to explain and set up than to play. I feel like that's a red flag for the how well the game works in general. (I'm looking at you, Add 'em Up!) And I think this affected the games modeled after card games in particular because you had to explain how the TPiR game related to the known card game, in addition to just explaining how the TPiR game worked. 

[Spmahn]

Also on the side of “Math is hard”, contestants have struggled to understand Check Game pretty much since it started, to the point where is became a running gag with Bob about how no one can seem to figure out the rules and anyone who does so by complete dumb luck

[JhayPrice]

On one note, pricing does involve a lot of mathematical concepts, but for today's contestants, they seem to be reliant on the audience for help, not really using any pricing skill as what contestants did around the first half of the Barker era.

But on with my take on Joker, a major flaw they had with it is that they just cloned 5PT into a non-pricing pricing game, just sheer luck.

[actual_retail_tice]

I would like to add as a foot note that I think Hit Me had one of the all time best-looking sets in the show’s history, and I was sorry to see that go.

[Briguy]

Poker Game's easy fix would simply be using six SPs and having the player pick three.

For me, Poker Game's fix might have been to begin using four-digit prizes, and make sure at least three of them have no more than two different digits. Ergo, having a prize that costs $1,515 or $4,499, etc. Yes, this allows a game to be set possibly have a four-of-a-kind with one pick (e.g., a gift that costs $7,777) and/or have the game set to be lost by having another four-digit prize with four of the same digit (i.e., $9,999, with the producers hoping the contestant would not pick that prize and – with a seemingly-safe four-of-a-kind with his 7777x – keep his hand).

Then again, this may show why Poker Game, IMO, may have been a victim of its time and why it was retired. Unless there is a bonus prize attached – and knowing the Drew Carey era, it would be related to the four three-digit prizes – you'd never be able to use a prize more than $999 and have total winnings of more than about $3,500 (most of them in the upper $2,000/lower $3,000 range) in an era where the least-expensive prize package in a single half of the show is typically around $6,000-6,500.

Brian

[Alfonzo]

I'd love to see the "Hit Me is easy for ME to understand, so nobody ELSE should have a problem!!" discourse go away.

This X 1,000. I learned how to play Blackjack when I was six and I was an excellent student in math. It took me years...SEVERAL years to completely understand Hit Me. There was simply way too much going on for most people to understand in a short amount of time. Sure, it didn't take me long to figure out what two grocery products you had to get to win, but explaining the game to people was a headache. I've said this before, but when I used to watch Price with people at work during lunch Hit Me was the only game in the rotation people didn't understand no matter how had I tried. You can tell the studio audience felt the same way by the tepid applause you heard throughout just about every playing.

And let's not even go into how inconsistent the show was about using an ace for the house!

[Archviler]

I don’t understand how Hit Me was so confusing. It’s basic multiplication and division. Even under the lights it shouldn’t be hard to understand.

As someone who 100% agrees with you and finds the difficulty with Hit Me baffling, I still think it should've been retired. Sometimes, for whatever reason, what should be an easy game on paper turns out difficult in reality. Magic # is a prime example of it these days, the game's not hard and it's set up to be won, yet the struggle continues. You can blame the game, the contestants or even the dumbing down of America. No matter which it is, the underlying point stands and it's better to have games the contestants understand without any confusion.

It's a shame, I liked Hit Me.

[pricefan18]

And let's not even go into how inconsistent the show was about using an ace for the house!

Well now wait a minute, was that something they actually could control from an S&P standpoint? Couldn't they have been forced to do it randomly to keep the game on the up and up from both sides of it?

[GobGlom]

Well now wait a minute, was that something they actually could control from an S&P standpoint? Couldn't they have been forced to do it randomly to keep the game on the up and up from both sides of it?

According to the FAQ on this site, Bob seemed to make the decision to value the ace as 11 or 1 on the fly in attempts to give the contestant a better chance of winning.
I do not know what the official written rules of the game are but if it's written that the ace can be 11 or 1, that wouldn't be against Standards and Practices.

[JayC]

Bob’s explanation probably didn’t help matters. Listen to the first 60 seconds of how Bob explains the game. He spends 50 seconds setting up the blackjack elements of the game using fancy words the contestant doesn’t understand. By the time Bob starts mentioning the grocery items and the multiplication aspect, the contestant is already long lost.

Vend-o-Price has the benefit of having its presentation focused completely around the multiplication aspect. There’s nothing to distract the contestant.

I think if Bob just got to the point and said choose the product with the exact price and the one whose price is multiplied by 10 that would've helped. But yes, Vend-o-Price is a quicker and easier version of the pricing mechanism Hit Me used. The contestant physically sees multiples of the product and is only making one decision.