Horror TV: WHEEL!

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(C)Copyright 2017, C. Burke.

With apologies to Pat Sajak. I don't want to know what happened to Vanna White.

Come back often for more funny math and geeky comics.

Day 28 of 30: Process of Elimination

This is day 28 of the 30-day blogging challenge. Putting horse racing metaphors aside on Indy weekend, it's the final lap and we're going all out.

If you ever watched Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, then you know that Jeff Foxworthy makes a great game-show host, with his ability to crack a joke at the right time and to be topical with what the contestants have said. He's a little slow moving the game along with all the pauses, but I think that that was more the decisions of the producers or directors. It's because of Foxworthy that, two season ago, I recorded the first few episodes of Are You Smarter Than a Bible Student?, better known as The Great American Bible Challenge. It's not a show for "religious nuts". It's funny, entertaining, and educational -- true if you've read the Bible, parts of it, or are just interested in all this Bible stuff you've heard about over the years.

I don't watch it to see if I can outscore the Bible study group contestants any more than I think I could outrun Jeopardy! champions or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? millionaires -- especially not if they're groups of nuns or rabbis. Yes, rabbis, who may have had a bit of an edge specializing in that first half of the Bible.

No, I watch it for moments that lead a confused Foxworthy to query a contestant, "Where are the pizza ovens in the Bible?"

I'm with Jeff -- my pastor never mentioned them in his sermons.

So why the long appreciation about the show now, in its season? Because of something from this week's episode. An attempt to build tension among those who know their Biblical lion-killers, but totally destroyed it among the mathematically aware. That is, me.

The penultimate round, the one that decides which two teams advance to the final round, is called The Chosen Three. One member of the team is asked a question with multiple answers. Six choices are displayed, three of which are correct and three are incorrect. There could be other correct answers which aren't one the board. To give an overly simple non-religious example:

Which of the following are days of the week?
Monday ... Tuesday ... Frog ... Jelly ... Friday ... Wisenheimer

There are more than three possible correct answers, but only three correct answers are given. The other three are incorrect. It seems to be random whether these questions are relatively easy or impossibly difficult. Or it could just be a matter of my education on the matter as I haven't attended a Bible study in years. After all, I answered one question because I remembered it from The Ten Commandments, not from Sister St. Mark's religion class.

Okay, so here's the math.

There are three teams. They go to the team with the most points first. If that team gets all three correct, they are a lock for the final round because no team will be able to catch them. If they miss one or two (or all three), they leave the door open for one or both of the other teams to pass them. (It is possible to miss all three, but there's one one combination that doesn't include any correct answers, which is difficult enough randomly, but this is also supposed to be the "smartest" player who should be able to identify at least one of the answers. That said, I think I remember seeing it happen exactly once in two years.)

So the second team gets a question about who killed a lion in the Bible. I didn't write down all the names, and I didn't even recognize all the names. The first four were Saul, David, Daniel and Samson. (And then two with more "Biblical" names.) The contestant said that he knew that David killed a lion, and that Daniel, who was known for being in the lion's den, just "palled around" with one but didn't kill it. He added that he didn't think that Saul had killed a lion. He wasn't sure about Samson, so he chose the other two.

This team needed two correct answers to be a lock for the final round. Foxworthy revealed that David did indeed kill a lion. They need one more, so tension is mounting. He says that the contestant was right that Saul did not kill one. And then jokes about Daniel. And ... waitaminute, what did you just do, Jeff?

Sure, you're going to try to increase the tension by revealing an incorrect guess, but that didn't matter anymore.

There are three choices that we don't know about. Two of them have to be correct. The contestant picked two out of the three. Ergo, he had picked one of the two correct answers! Yes! I was so annoyed that I used the word "Ergo"!

Simple process of elimination, Jeff. There weren't enough choices remaining to have had both incorrect. His other two guesses had to be Yes-No, No-Yes or Yes-Yes. There are only three incorrect choices and you revealed two of them. So while tension was mounting, and I'll grant you that at times like this a contestant might not be thinking logically, those with no cars in the race (Indy weekend!) already knew the outcome!

That was a little bit of disappointment in an otherwise fine broadcast. Well, that and the lack of pizza ovens.

There's Cake!

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(C)Copyright 2013, C. Burke.

Sometimes you just have to step through and move beyond 'pie' jokes.

Review: Zombie Dice (Steve Jackson Games)

Zombie Dice is a fun, quick game of odds and probabilities and generally pushing your luck from Steve Jackson Games. It's a somewhat reminiscent of FOR*GET*IT, but with streamlined rules and a better scoring system that avoids one of that game's biggest flaws. (*)

Each player is a zombie searching for brains while trying to avoid shotgun blasts as represented on the sides of the nicely crafted green, yellow and red dice. The colors are important because your probability of success is higher with green than with red, but the dice you roll are chosen randomly, so look out. (Note: if playing a zombie bothers you for some reason, you could easily flip this game around and be humans looking to shotgun the zombies before your brains are eaten, but that would be more challenging with these dice. The zombies numbers are overwhelming.)

The rules literally take seconds to learn, and their simplicity might fool you into believing that the game is too simple. Start believing that and you'll pay everything (to paraphrase the song) when you roll the dice just one more time. You risk all the points for the round on every roll, and you can only dodge the shotguns for so long. Under the best circumstances, there's better than a 40% chance of seeing the business end of those barrels.

There were a few drawbacks discovered from our first sessions. First, going last is a major advantage, so we have a House Rule that the first player from the previous round goes last in the following round so that this position rotates.

Second, there's no interaction between the players other than goading them into taking another dangerous roll or convincing them to play it safe. Psychological manipulation aside, maybe an expansion could address this with some kind of challenge dice or interference cards or some other twist.

Third, after a few games, the nifty Zombie Dice cup start to show signs of wear around the rim, caused by players shoving their fingers down into the narrow can to draw their dice randomly. (It's called "gravity", people. Tip the cup upwards and the dice will come to you!) Quick Fix for next time: put the dice in a spare dice bag and use the cup to roll only the three you select.

Summary: Great, quick game. Perfect between longer games, for the one-last-game-before-we-go game, or a we're-still-waiting-for-you-know-you game. (And then tell them about all the fun they missed for coming late.) And if you like zombie games, you probably have bags of little plastic zombies. use them to keep score.

(*) In FOR*GET*IT, if, for example, all the "IT" dice are out of play, you're free to continue rolling until you max out of points without any chance of losing. There's always the possibility of Bad Stuff on every die in Zombie Dice