BuzzerBlog

If you check out ABC’s website for their new game show tournament Duel, you can find a lot of new video clips. You can click here to see it also. One in particular is a two-question sneak peek of the show along with a video explaining the rules. For those who aren’t watching the clips, let’s do a quick rules explanation.

The player in control chooses an opponent. They each have 10 chips. Host reads a question, the players have as much time as they want to place a chip on every answer they think it is (they can put a chip on all four answers if they want). After they are done, they hit a green button to lock in. The right and wrong answers are shown. All right answer chips are returned to the player and wrong answer chips are taken away. Each chip is worth $5,000 and that money is added to the jackpot someone can win in the finale. If someone misses one question or runs out of chips, they lose. Each player can hit the “Pressure Button” twice a game which forces your opponent to answer in seven seconds.

Some positives to start: it’s a relatively hard trivia show, that of which we don’t see often.  It looks nice and plays nice.  It’s also rare that we get a show with actual competition in it.  Also, a tournament show is not a common item.  The idea of a tournament is really special for game shows because it’s basically the best player who wins the game, unlike many other shows today.  The host, Mike Greenberg isn’t too bad either so far.  He seems a bit stiff on this clip, and the whole “Screen Up/Down” thing is going to get annoying very quickly.  However, this is likely the first episode and the first game, so there’s no reason to judge him off of this.

However, we got enough game play to know what’s going on, and I feel some what let down with Duel. They made this seem much bigger, grander, and strategic than it is. Honestly, it’s just Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and “Please let my opponent miss before I do.” There’s not much you can do for strategy with this. They keep trying to play a poker aspect up, and I just don’t see it. The only remotely sneaky thing you can do is quietly place a chip on the board and fake your opponent out. But even if you do that, who cares? If you ignore your opponent and regulate yourself to answering quickly and correctly using as few chips as possible, you don’t need to even to consider the person across from you.

The set’s nice and the whole thing is set up well. The trivia will be fun to play for a bit, but it’s basically another Millionaire ripoff, only a bit more obvious, with two lifelines instead of three. This judging is just from a small preview and other items. Hopefully it’ll be a bit more exciting and different on the air. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a pretty fun show (miles better than anything ABC has done so far) and probably better than 1 VS 100 currently because of their screwy scoring. However, there’s nothing in this show to make me forget that pre-2008 1 VS 100 and Power of 10 are a bit more exciting and fun than this. It’s just another clone brought into the game farm, albeit a much more enjoyable clone than a lot of shows in a while. I feel bad for countries that have this show without a tournament format.