Post by dougmorrisontheair on Dec 29, 2021 23:05:11 GMT -5
I saw this episode of the British version of TPiR and a particular pricing game for the first time.
Among the games played: Trade Up (their Trader Bob), Side By Side (played differently from, and well before, our SBS), and Tic Tac Toe.
According to Wikipedia, which should be taken with a grain of salt, Tic Tac Toe was "a variation on Secret X". It is -- and -- it isn't.
As you'll see, Tic Tac Toe didn't involve Noughts and Crosses (how they expressed Os and Xs, respectively, and called the game Tic Tac Toe). This Tic Tac Toe involved a replica fruit machine (a.k.a. a one-armed bandit or slot machine here in the U.S.).
Tic Tac Toe's pricing element: The contestant was presented with a prize and three possible choices -- one of which was the actual retail price (the right price and the wrong prices were less than £200 each in this playing; I can only hypothesize that stayed consistent). Picking the right price awarded the prize and gave the player three chances to win a much bigger prize (vacation, or "holiday" as they call it, in this episode). Among the wrong choices, the one closer to the right price awarded no prize but two chances; the remaining wrong choice award one chance. (IIRC, a similar process was used on their version of Let 'Em Roll.)
The earned chances would come in the form of placards with the word "Toe" on them. (This is where the game is better seen than explained -- a la Tetris) The host, the late Leslie Crowther, directed the player's attention to the fruit machine with four paylines. The reels of the machine had, as you'd expect, cherries, lemons, and plums. The reels also had the words "Tic" and "Tac" in the first and second reel, respectively, of each payline.
The player must place an earned "Toe" card in the third window of each desired payline. Then, the host spins the selected paylines one at a time. Only *one* payline will yield the winning result of "Tic Tac" to accompany the "Toe" to ultimately read out the name of the game. (In other words, if you got two fruits, "Tic" and a fruit, or a fruit and "Tac", that's not a winner.)
To be fair to the Wikipedian, there is a Secret X element to this game. Perfect pricing doesn't guarantee a winning result (that and Joker). Given the fruit machine setup, it had more of a truncated Bonus Game vibe.
It would be more fun if Tic Tac Toe had a different name (Fruit Machine, for example) and the pricing element had 50:50 choices (with four prizes of less than £200 each and, thus, offering a chance at an automatic win with perfect pricing).
