I had that exact same idea for Make Your Move! I even joked that they could make the change permanent and Make Your Move could be the quickest SP/Car game in the dhow's lineup! The producers would love it!
Makes you wonder why they haven't yet tried it.
Money Game for a boat.
Has already been done.
Card Game works soooo much better with four digit prices. Something is lost when each card draw feels like pouring a thimble in a well.
Agreed, but instead of downgrading the game (for I would think downgrading any car game to something less than a car just makes the show look cheap), maybe it's time to reconsider how the standard deck is used.
Forget the opening bid and make the standard deck the number on the card in thousands of dollars. As every car is over $20k now, you'd have to make a few draws to start; and this makes things really no different than when the opening bid was zero or $2,000 and you'd be topping out around $6-$8k. Plus, you restore the long lost risk where one more draw may put you over, a feat difficult to achieve under the current format in this day and age.
Now, admittedly, having twenty-four $10k cards between the tens and face cards is not going to work very well, as you run a high risk of a single draw putting the contestant very obviously over when still needing to draw to get close enough to the ARP. The fix, as I see it, would simply be to play with less than a standard deck. Perhaps you could use a deck of thirty-nine distributed as follows:
Four of the aces (still holdable and wild for any amount), duces, threes and fours;
Three of the fives, sixes and sevens;
Two of the eights, nines and tens.
Under this arrangement, the odds of drawing an ace are notably increased (up to 10.3% from 7.7%) but so are the odds of an extra draw putting you over as you exhaust the lower-value cards. The ace (if you are so fortunate as to draw one) can then be used for its intended purpose of targeting close to a bid without drawing further and not as a card made an exaggerated value for the purposes of wrapping up the game quickly since all non-ace draws add such a miniscule amount.
A change to the special deck would be necessary as getting within $1,000 would be pretty nigh difficult when your smallest non-wildcard is $2,000. How about three each of $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 and $6,000?
My math may be missing some pitfalls, so perhaps there's a better distribution to use; but I think it's a start in fixing Card Game.