That One Level/Live-Action TV/Game Show

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


If any of these scenarios happen to you while playing for cash and prizes, you're leaving with the Home Game and Rice-A-Roni, my friend.


  • Most Jeopardy! contestants seem to have trouble with categories that deal with opera, ballet, or spelling the correct response. Lampshaded whenever the producers name such a set something like "The Dreaded Opera Category".
  • Pyramid contestants had trouble conveying the names of famous people to their partners. It doesn't really help that saying the entire name is a mouthful when you're playing against the clock. However, Genre Savvy players could clear this category with relative ease if they remembered that all the clue-receiver had to say was the last name (unless the host said otherwise).
    • This one was even lampshaded on the box "I Hope It's Not Names", which led to the category "Things a Pyramid contestant might think about."
  • For Wheel of Fortune's 12th season (1994-1995), they tried a new category called Megaword. Each puzzle was a 9- to 13-letter word that, after solving, the contestant could use in a sentence to earn a $500 bonus. Pat made it blatantly obvious from the get-go that he hated the category, and for good reason. Most Megawords were extremely uncommon words and/or had a lot of uncommon letters, leading to one incident where someone solved a fully-revealed puzzle of PRISTINELY incorrectly — and another where it took eleven spins before someone uncovered any of the letters in OXIDIZED, and eleven more before anyone revealed another. Worst of all, the sentences were not judged for proper use of the word; just about anything other than a deer-in-the-headlights stare was accepted. Needless to say, Megaword didn't make it too far into 1995.
    • Slang was sometimes prone to this, most notably on BUTTINSKY in 1993. With only the U and I missing, it took 9 turns before someone pronounced it correctly.
    • Similarly, the Bonus Round can be this at times. Even with 10-11 letters at your disposal (RSTLNE plus three more consonants and a vowel, and a fourth consonant if the contestant has a Wild Card), some bonus puzzles can be nearly impossible to solve thanks to heavy reliance on obscure letters. And it's not as if they're tied to the value of the prize, either, since that's not revealed until after the fact. So good luck trying to figure out, say, HAZY SKY or AT THE BUZZER even only for $30,000.
  • On Nickelodeon's |Double Dare, the obstacle course Bonus Round always had one segment, like "Pick It!", "Garbage Truck", or "Blue Plate Special", where the contestant had find the flag hidden in gunge, often only by touch. "Squelch'm Waffles" was especially bad, since there were usually two waffles, and the flag was always hidden in the bottom one.
  • Supercoin on Minute to Win It. Since it's the million-dollar game, and the show doesn't change games until someone has won it, it's unlikely the top prize will be won (barring Executive Meddling).
    • Also belongs to Don't Blow the Joker. It's a game so hard that it was the first one for NBC to provide official hints for. It doesn't help that this game is typically found in the level 4-6 range, usually resulting in a major Difficulty Spike. God help you if you get it on Level 5...
  • Shrine of the Silver Monkey in Legends of the Hidden Temple, it's simply piecing a monkey out of three blocks, but in an already tough game show (where starting with less then a full Pendant is Unwinnable), it's often the room where contestant end up losing the biggest amount of time. Then there's the tree room, where a token half and a switch is hidden in one of two trees, but the other tree is a guardian, so it's down to pure luck if the contestant gets tagged out.
  • While Takeshi's Castle is known for its infamous difficulty. The level that had the fewest winners was either "Rice Bowl Down Hill" where contestants had to sit in a rice bowl down a water slide and not fall off or "Quake" where they had to kneel on several levels of cushions and not fall off while the entire set shook. Not to mention the various other levels that were simply based on luck alone, such as when they had to chose out of five holes which to jump down, two were safe. There was absolutely no way for anybody to make a guess as to which to go down.
  • In The Amazing Race, there's just about always one or two roadblocks or legs that really stump people up.
    • Any Food challenge. It tends to be either:
      • Eat something really really gross
      • Eat something that's not-so-gross...but you have to eat it fast or sickening amounts of it.
    • "Needle in a haystack" challenges - such as finding a sign amongst a sea of similar-looking signs (Especially neon signs) or one person in a hugely-crowded area.
    • The american version has the haybales - it defines That One Level. One team could not even finish it because they never found a clue. It was a Luck-Based Mission for sure - you had a 5% chance of finding a clue as you unrolled the haybales. While the probabilities of finding a clue went up the more haybales were unrolled, it was still fully possible to keep on rolling and rolling and never finding one. Which is exactly what happened to Lena and Krista, who unrolled haybales for six hours.
  • On The Price Is Right, some pricing games are notoriously difficult to win.
    • Pay The Rent features a massive $100,000 grand prize, but to get it, you have to place six grocery items in a 1-2-2-1 tiered fashion such that each tier has a higher total than the tier before it. There is only one correct solution out of multiple possibilities, and while a contestant's first instinct is to place the least expensive item on the first tier, that only guarantees there is no way to win the grand prize. The good news is, it's extremely easy to win $10,000 by simply bailing at the third tier.
    • Lucky $even is a game where you have to guess the last four digits of a car, and you lose $1 for each number you're off by on each guess. You have $7 to start and must have $1 at the end to win. While a price like $16,545 is easy to win on, more often than not the price contains multiple extreme numbers (1, 2, 8, and 9) that take out contestants who guess down the middle or go for the wrong extreme.
    • That's Too Much is a game that even Drew mentions is hard to win. There is a series of 10 prices in increasing order and you have to stop at the first price that is higher than the price of the car; contestants usually like to stop around the middle, when the correct price is either early on (3rd or 4th) or towards the end (7th or 8th).
    • Temptation is a game where you have to give the last four digits of a car by choosing from two possible numbers on each digit. You have to get every single one right; miss one, and you get nothing. That gives this game effectively a 1 out of 16 chance of being won (1 out of 8 if you can figure out the second digit or if the last digit isn't a 0 or 5 choice). The number choices come from the prices of four gifts that usually total a decent amount, and alternatively, a contestant can bail out with the gifts, which just means even some contestants who get the car price right don't end up winning the car. It took over four years since Drew started hosting for the game to be won.
    • Stack the Deck is yet another notoriously hard game. You have to form the price of a car out of seven possible numbers, and you can get up to three numbers given for you by playing 1 Right Price with three pairs of grocery items. The difficulty is two-fold; if the grocery items are hard, you can end up with only one or even no free numbers, which makes the game almost impossible. But even with all three numbers, many contestants have still lost because they did not guess the remaining two numbers correctly.
    • Many pricing games in the past have been retired for being considered too hard or too confusing. Most notable of these is the original Bullseye, in which you had to figure out the exact price of a four-digit car in seven guesses, only being told after each guess whether the price was higher or lower. Unsurprisingly, this game was never won. Not even giving the contestant a $1,000 range helped.
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