Tag Archives: quiz the nation

On the move

moving-houseThis site isn’t going anywhere, but there are a few exit games moving and shaking at the moment:

  • The justifiably renowned clueQuest have completed their move to a new location, half a mile or so up the road from King’s Cross station. (According to the lower half of this blog entry, they reopened on March 11th.) Their new location is in what seems to be a safe and pleasant neighbourhood in south Islington. This site popped by a couple of days ago and work was well and truly in progress, particularly on the outside – but looking through the open front door down the smart-looking corridor suggests that the building has as much depth, and as many hidden depths as you would hope.
  • Tick Tock Unlock have been massively busy with their new Liverpool location, but their first site in Leeds has been very difficult to book with its single room and would likely have sold many more spaces if it possibly could have done. Accordingly, this Tweet suggesting we are looking forward to moving to our new venue next week sounds like a great step forwards. This site hopes that every site relocation is a positive one!
  • Over in the north-west, Clue HQ have launched their Blackpool location, with a brand new game entitled Detonation. (This site understands it’s about the Greek financial crisis… now there’s a beta-minus joke.) In truth, the new room sees teams on the trail of a criminal notorious for blowing up anyone who attempts to track him down. The game is intended to have a slightly lower difficulty level than their famously fiendish tests in Warrington, but early reviews point to another winner.

Some other matters arising:

1) The ninth weekly episode of online play-along-at-home-on-an-app game Quiz The Nation takes place at 8pm on Sunday night; it’ll be the last one for now, and the last chance to play for free in order to earn money prizes and further playing tokens for when it returns in a month and a half. The tech has improved (though do make sure the app has access to your device’s microphone) and the operators have earnt a good reputation for paying out the advertised prizes quickly. Not in this direction, yet, though that’s not exactly their fault.

2) As previously discussed, Engima Escape are crowdfunding through a Kickstarter appeal. They’re making more progress than other UK exit game Kickstarters of previous years, and at least one unsuccessful crowdfunding project has nevertheless turned into a very successful live site. Nevertheless, their appeal could surely do with some more love if you’re in a position to give, whether you’re in a position to play the game or not.

3) Mark at QMSM should be either very proud or very ashamed of his most recent post, and this site is only 96% sure it’s the former.

Quiz The Nation

Quiz The Nation(Logo copyright The Challenge Factor IPTV Ltd.)

Sunday night saw the first episode of Quiz The Nation; as previously discussed, this is a nationwide quiz show where the questions are broadcast over satellite TV (or streamed online) to players at home or in a pub, who can respond to the questions through special apps on their phone or tablets. The player with most correct reponses, with response speed taken as a tie-breaker, wins the quiz. Scores and positions (both in your particular location and nationally) are displayed at the end of each round.

The app is free to download and comes with five tokens at no charge. Playing the quiz costs two credits; there are four additional optional “spot prize” one-question shootouts per show, as an additional optional extra between rounds (if you don’t need to go to the bar or the loo?) where the fastest correct answer nationally earns a £50 bonus prize. The overall quiz winner is promised a £1,000 cash prize, with players in positions 2 to 50 also sharing another £1,000 of prizes; possibly cash, possibly paid as tokens – the specifics have not yet been confirmed but are expected imminently.

The prizes are funded, in part, by selling additional tokens after the first five; it’s cheaper if you buy them in bulk, but roughly each one costs a little over a pound. The spot prizes do have something of the feel of a premium rate phone number quiz, but two tokens for a full hour’s interactive quiz seems like a very reasonable price, especially in light of the prizes on offer. It is believed that only something like 160 players took part in week one, so with prizes paid out exceeding the cost of tokens purchased, even if people were purchasing tokens in the first place, in poker terminology there is quite a handsome overlay. As the old jopke goes, Plus EV!

The quiz itself consists of five rounds: “odd one out” (a cute take on a picture quiz), mental agility, intelligence (which will definitely be grist to puzzle fans’ mills), observation and general knowledge (again, inspired by pictures). The older among you may recognise resemblances to The Krypton Factor on TV, and there is crossover in the personnel as well, most notably with the questions being read out by Granadaland TV journalism legend Gordon Burns. The questions neatly ramp up in difficulty within each round; while they never become unsociably difficult for pub play, the questions towards the end of each stanza do start to tickle.

The main question: how well does it work? Sadly, listening to the show over the online stream, the app wouldn’t sync with the audio from the stream here and thus it’s not possible to judge. That said, at least one friend of mine did manage to make the streamed version sync with the app, and I’m not aware of people watching the satellite broadcast (as intended) having problems. Similar technology has been used on other TV shows, notably Ludus. Minor server-side bug fixes are promised from one week to the next; the strength and reliability of the tech will make the venture sink or swim overall.

The closest comparison will not sound very flattering, but is intended as a high compliment. Back in 1995, a service called Two Way TV started, promising the ability to play along with shows (principally quiz shows!) on live TV. The service started regionally in 1996, though it’s not clear whether the national rollout ever really made it. (A single viewing of a TV ad for the service still looms large in the mind.) Perhaps the system was two decades ahead of its time and the world is ready for it now. Playing this feels somewhat like how that might have been. (The company responsible survived and evolved to, effectively, app developers long before there were ubiquitous app platforms.)

Fingers crossed that Quiz The Nation proves a hit and can grow from strength to strength… though if it takes a little longer and some more lovely puzzle people can take advantage of the relatively small crowds to take the early prizes, so much the better. 😉 If the tech continues to work well and prove popular, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be used for more specialist sorts of games. Music quizzes and sports quizzes are well-established – but how about broadcasting play-along-at-home puzzles to the nation at large? Why not?

Puzzles in pubs and public

Puzzled Pint London logoAfter last month’s play-by-e-mail involuntary experiment, the regular format meetings of Puzzled Pint in London (and in ten other cities, now not just in US but also in Canada!) resumed on the second Tuesday of this month, as every month. This month’s London event was the largest yet in the city, featuring a record 18 teams and 77 players, and was warmly received.

The London location has spawned its own Facebook page and Twitter account, to which the latest information will be posted (full disclosure: often by my wife, who is part of the Game Control team there). Getting 77 extra people to turn up for a few hours on a Tuesday night would be a real boon to some pubs; perhaps other pubs might find it in their interest to hold puzzle events yet. (Or, quite possibly, perhaps the success of Puzzled Pint is something that cannot be caught in a bottle and replicated, and its casual, non-commercial nature is part of its success.)

One interesting, slightly related, event that’s starting up from Sunday night is Quiz The Nation, which will be broadcast on an (admittedly slightly obscure) satellite TV channel weekly at 8pm on Sunday evenings. Get your team together, work out the answers to the questions in real time and submit them in the custom app. Over a hundred pubs have said that they will host gatherings for people who all want to play along, and will presumably have a TV set to the channel rather than Sunday night sport. After each round, the app will notify you of your score and position, both nationally and relative to inhabitants of wherever you’re playing. However, if you don’t have a local pub that’s playing, you can play along at home; if you’re at home and don’t have satellite TV, you may be able to stream the channel from the showcase TV site. (It might be a few seconds behind satellite TV, though, and if speed of response is scored, those seconds might be crucial.)

So far, so standard. Quizzes and their players are fun, but not really this site’s sort of fun. The reason why this site is reporting on this is that the quiz and app come from the team behind The Krypton Factor, and are importing some of that show’s signature mental agility tests into this new venture. This turns it from a straight quiz, with all its attendant downfalls, limitations, flaws and elements of brokenness into something much more puzzly, and thus much more interesting. Perhaps this might be a way to get puzzles – even if not by name – into scores of pubs at once and across the country? Perhaps this might be a way for puzzlers to plunder precious prizes! This site looks forward to finding out.

The next MIT Mystery Hunt starts on Friday 16th at a random 17 minutes after noon Boston time (so 5:17pm UK time, etc.), as counted down by this occasionally acid countdown timer, and plenty of puzzle fans are getting mighty excited about it already, as witnessed by the raging #mysteryhunt hashtag. Some people have made relatively short practice hunts for their teams, and at least one has been made available to the public.

However, with the MIT Mystery Hunt in mind, the craziest thing that this site has enjoyed recently is a couple of rounds of Spaghetti at Eric Berlin’s blog. The MIT Mystery Hunt is known for getting people to make remarkable leaps of logic to find patterns between collections of answers to solve meta-puzzles. Eric Berlin helps people practice this by creating collections of random words and phrases – and everybody’s in on the joke – and inviting people to solve them as if they were answers from which a metapuzzle answer must be extracted. The creativity to make something out of absolutely nothing is remarkable, and that of the second game is even more mind-blowing.

Thankfully this site gets to play with much more sensible puzzles!