Well this game has been sitting on the table for a week now, so last night Joy and I thought we’d give it a quick run-through to see how it compares with the real thing.
So, first things first, what do you get for your money? As you would expect, there are 22 boxes and 22 amounts of money (exactly the same amounts as in the real thing) and also 3 spare boxes, should you lose any. There are also 22 black pieces of card which cover up the amounts of money on the board as and when they are revealed. The board itself contains the amounts of money, a coffee cup where your chosen box sits and a telephone. This brings us to the piece de resistance which is the telephone itself. The telephone is the same as the real thing, except it has a button for each amount of money (to be pressed as it disappears) and a “Confirm” and “Cancel” button to be used if in your excitement, you make an incorrect selection.
Upon turning the phone on (batteries not included) alarm bells start ringing. A friendly voice greets you to the game, but the voice is unfamiliar, certainly not that of Edmunds. Panic sets in. Surely there is nothing that Edmunds would not put his name to for the sake of a fistfull of coins, yet examination of the entire contents of the game reveal the only evidence of his existence is his curmudgeonly face on the games packaging.
The game begins regardless. I play the role of the contestant; Joy plays the role of everyone else. It is a good start though. 4 blues and the £10,000 go. The phone rings but those alarm bells are off again. “You have 20 seconds to decide whether to accept the offer below” announces the man who does the “Mind the gap” announcements on the London Underground stations. Again it seems more questions are being asked than answered. “Who is this man?”, we know it isn’t Edmunds, and we know it isn’t the banker. Why 20 seconds? On further investigation it seems that after each offer, you have a randomly determined amount of time between 10 and 30 seconds to decide whether to deal or no deal. The other worry is the offer itself. It quickly becomes clear that the formula is very simple
x=∑(a+b+c+…..)/n
where x is the offer, n is the amount of boxes left and a,b,c… are the amounts left. For the simplest example, if you are down to the last 2 boxes, £1000 and £5000, the offer will be £3000. This is fairly unrealistic to the TV show, as it is the maximum the banker can ever offer and is only used in fairly rare exceptions. It also removes psychology and mind games as you always know what your offer is going to be.
Although these points sound very negative, the game itself is still great fun to play. The random element is still there (although I suspect if you were to play enough times, you could tell the difference between the boxes by wear and tear should the money not be changed each time). Graphically, everything is true to the TV version and the game play is as close as I can imagine you can get on a board game to the real thing. It is a shame though that with a bit more thought into the banker/offers and the prevalence of Edmunds, this game would truly have been a challenger for Trivial Pursuit et al for the dinner party game crown.
7/10
PS - I won £22025, Joy won a tenner 
