alphabetics-- pyramid winners circle
pyramid winners circle-- alphabetics

very close call but ill go pyramid

Winners Circle, tournament or not.

Wonderwall gets a very serious honorable mention.

/She still had a freakin' pit stop left...

Fast Money

Definitely have to go with the Winner's Circle. Especially if you have a chance to see an episode of the $10,000 Pyramid. (An episode is on Page-O-Clips, btw.) You could definitely feel the tension, and sense the excitement of winning $10,000 in just a minute, which was unheard of in 1973.

Not a win, but watch how this one plays out. The audience's involvement was crazy.

Any Barry-Enright endgame. (kidding....)

Ummm...this is tough....I'm torn between Alphabetics, the Wonderwall, and the Pyramid Winner's Circle. Probably go with the Wonderwall.

70's and 80's Pyramid of course, but I also liked the ShowDown roll.

Pyramid's Winner's Circle, certainly. And I'll throw in an honorable mention for Scrabble's Bonus Sprint, just for how it was a natural extension of everything else on the show.

I'm not. I think those games of chance and skill are great! But If anything I'll go with the Ol' Matching game of Classic Concentration's Car bonus !!

And since I'm on the subject of Matching, But I'm not sure if this will count; it would be the Matching Board from 3 (or Three) on a Match as a honorable mention .

Agreed. Not having been around to experience the '50s big money shows, $10,000 was the most money I had ever heard of awarding someone on a game show, especially in 60 seconds; it far eclipsed the paltry sums that were more common on daytime games in the early '70s. I can remember screaming with excitement at age 10 the first time I ever saw anyone win the Winners' Circle.

Winner's Circle. Why are we even HAVING this conversation?

honorable mention wipeout

Really? I thought it was uninteresting at best, and completely broken at worst. The latter point is proven when one guy runs several checks in about 30 seconds to win the car without even looking at the answers he's swapping.

I agree with Brother Ottinger. This list begins and ends with the Winners Circle.

I suppose it takes a bit of manual dexterity to pull a lever or press down a button, but other than that I'm lost. Or do you mean the skill in saying "Naw, I don' t need a sailboat and china hutch, $950 is fine."?

Admittedly, I like Face The Devil and Bonus Island too. (For some reason, Face The Dragon, not so much.) I don't pretend they are masterpieces of skill or anything, but Lord knows I play enough press-your-luck type games, myself.

The Wonder Wall may have been more fun to play as a contestant, even without considering the amount of money involved, but it was terrible to try to watch it. The Winner's Circle wins, hands down. (But I agree that the Scrabble Bonus Sprint was darn good too.)

I gotta go with Alphabetics for my money. I'll give an honorable mention to Wheel of Fortune, just because no one else has yet.

Winner's Circle. Alphabetics/Super Password. Wonderwall.

I'll give my honorable mention to the Classic Concentration end game. A great balance of luck, memory, and skill - I think just because it hasn't been seen in about 15 years anywhere, some folks have forgotten about it, but it was a good game.

In a case of a skill-based endgame, I have to agree with Winner's Circle.

But for out and out suspense, you have to say the Golden Doors from Dream House is one of the better ones..

$10,000 Pyramid turned the endgame into an event.

Other shows had endgames before that, but they were along the lines of Password's Lightning Round - a fun diversion, but not that exciting. It's no coincidence that nearly every other suggestion here came after the Winner's Circle.

Understood. For what they are, the games are fine. But to say that they rate in the top tier of skill based end games is silly. That's all I was refuting.

I guess Bob Stewart wasn't very strict about not using one's hands at the beginning of the Pyramid run....

I always thought Whew's Gauntlet of Villains was pretty awesome...

Hmm... interesting observation...

/Baffled as to why nobody's mentioned the Double Dare Obstacle Course yet...
//And not even honorably...

Oh, he *did* use the word "skil" (sic) in there, didn't he? Please, then, by all means, continue.

I don't understand why. I've given it not even a minute of thought, and I can confidently say it wouldn't even crack my Top 10.

My top 5:

1) Winner's Circle
2) Wonderwall
3) Alphabetics / Super Password
4) Money Cards
5) Gauntlet of Villains

Hell, I'd put the Blackout Clue Screen ahead of the Obstacle Course.

/giving it another minute or two...nope, not even Top 15.

Just my humble opinion, that's all. :) It's not the best in the world (that obvoiusly goes to the Winner's Circle), but I do think it at least deserves an honorable mention.

Well, we disagree, and seeing as it has, indeed, not been mentioned at all, honorably or otherwise, I have an idea what side the majority of the participants in this discussion seem to be coming down on.

As far as dramatic build up my favorite has always been The Golden Doors. Hands down, bar none.

However, in a game of skill and knowledge, I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the NYSI end round. Complimented the main game like the Scrabble Sprint did and had some of the clues just as clever. I always enjoyed it. Never mind I really liked the idea of a progressive jackpot.

...My biggest problem with the NYSI bonus game is the depending on whether you're talking about the Narz or Henry version, the bonuses tended to run either unusually difficult (Narz), or unusually easy (Henry) on a consistent basis.

Winner's Circle & the Golden Doors are the ones that are the best in terms of suspense, but to me, I need one with a play-along factor. Having said that, here are my choices in no particular order:

Scrabble Super Sprint
The Golden Run
Wonderwall(though it's hard to pick up on an answer when it's moving let alone finding all 20 in 3:00)
The WoF bonus puzzle
The Gauntlet of Villams

Just as mostly everyone else has said, Winner's Circle is my favorite, but I thought the "stroll down Rodeo Drive" was a fairly good concept in the same vein as the Gauntlet of Villains.

My Choice: A Tie between the Winner's Circle and the Money Cards.

I grew up watching the Winner's Circle and was always exciting. It didn't matter who was the host, but it has been, and will always be tense to the last second. As for the Money Cards, I marveled at the sight of winning $28,000 just by calling the cards high or low. Then again, I was 14 when I first saw it on GSN and thought it was that easy (8 years later, doesn't seem that way).

Honorable mention: The Winner's Big Money Game. Yes, it had nothing to do with $ale, but it was a damn good attempt to make a "traditional" bonus game.
(EDIT: I'll go with the NYSI end game too. I can find most of the answers quicker than the contestants, regardless of how dated they are.)

The Winner's Circle is the most exciting. Bob S's end games were often better than the Main Game. Two of my favorites remain the original Chain Reaction and Winning Streak bonus games.

technical question

would you consider millonaire to be one giant end game?

No. Final Jeopardy is closer to an endgame than all of Millionaire is. And Final J! is just a "final round".

I don't know why anybody hasn't mentioned the trip to the Prize Vault on Rayburn's "Break the Bank" yet. (Just kidding.)

I'm not that wild about Alphabetics. I'd put the original Lightning Round in instead. Obviously the stakes were nothing to get excited about, but it was great fun to see the celebs get flustered. And it had the great name. Alphabetics, to me, just took that and made it more like "Pyramid."

I'm glad you put in Money Cards--that's what a Barry/Enright end game SHOULD be. I do like the "Now You See It" solo game, and love how challenging it is. (This is the Narz version now running on NYSI.) Nobody's mentioned the Golden Medley. And despite how stupid it is, the Big Showdown was fun to watch, at least to a seven-year-old.

Winner's Circle, #1. 75% of the time you have a nail-biter, and the play along element is fantastic. There are so many good things here: tough rules, tough writing, a countdown clock. Someone mentioned that the host doesn't count, and I agree in that the Donnymid WC was produced terribly. If Donny was at the helm for the original Pyramid, that would have been fine.

If there had been a better way to produce the Wonderwall, that's my #2. I love, love that endgame and it would be a great one to adapt elsewhere. And our version was superior to the UK version, because there wasn't as much to lose on the UK version.

My #3 is from the UK: The Vault had a great endgame if the player didn't dally on one question. I like how the player could posit as many guesses as they wanted...some answers were obtained by counting upwards.

As I've said before: Donny was easily the BEST thing about that version of the Pyramid. It would have been completely tolerable if they had plucked him out and dropped him onto the 80's set with the 80's writers.

Craig Karlberg wrote:

You don't yell clues at the screen during the Winner's Circle?

Except that he didn't play out the subjects like Dick Clark did.

One of the things that was so cool was the trademark clock tick. I can't imagine why they Harry Friedman didn't use it, or start with that and build a soundtrack around it.

How cool to see those early episodes when the money was big and the celebrities were almost as excited as the players.

If Dick hosted the '02 version, would have been better? Or would it have been a bright red bow on a steaming hot pile of crap?


OT: Last night's Family Guy had a Pyramid spoof, complete with Mr. Clark playing out a fake category...and the 80's theme too.

No, but that was his own decision, and I don't think it would have affected the overall show that much.

And I found this morning that Fox posts their episodes on the website the next day, so if you haven't seen it, watch it on the website. All it was missing was "two, four-fifty, five, six, seven-hundred and fifty dollars."

The first thing that came to mind when I saw this thread was the $10,000 Dash from The Moneymaze. However, to be honest, I can't definitely put it above the Winners Circle.

Other choices: the Mystery Tune from $100,000 Name That Tune in its first two seasons. and the bonus round from All-Star Baffle (a contestant from the studio audience had to get nine words in 30 seconds from three-letter clues).

Honorable mention - not for how exciting it was, but for going against the flow; on the Bill Cosby version of You Bet Your Life, you had to pick one of three envelopes to see whether or not you were playing for $10,000, and you had to answer one final question - but in this case, the question came first, so if you got it wrong, you didn't have to suffer the humiliation of finding out you would have been playing for the $10,000. (Imagine if somebody was to even suggest doing something like that with the Wheel of Fortune bonus round.)

-- Don

Indeed, I believe both Alphabetics and the Winners Circle to be the best. Lots of suspense, lots of play-along factor, yet simple and tied to the rest of the game.

I'll also put in another vote for the NYSI Solo Round. Of course, though, NYSI's been a favorite of mine altogether lately, so I'd have some bias.....

Can't believe no one brought up Diamond Head. Who hasn't dreamed of being surrounded by a torrent of cash, grabbing as much as you can and stuffing it into your pockets?

Ok, a bit tongue in cheek perhaps, it's not the greatest game in the world, but for sheer spectacle, it's hard to beat.

How many other end games have become iconic like this? Just last week, I saw a new commercial based around a couple in a glass booth grabbing something or other.

The judging seemed to get much harder as time went on, didn't it?

For me, I guess Winner's Circle would be No. 1, but the Gauntlet of Villains is up there too.

I was trying to think of a suspenseful, exciting endgame that came before the Winner's Circle, and the closest I can come up with is the Big Deal of the Day. I'm not sure whether to call that an endgame or part of the main game. If it's an endgame, then the Showcase on TPIR probably is as well, since the concepts are similar.

My guess is that no one has said it yet because it's a slapped on extra round, instead of something clever, new or interesting.

I don't get it. The topic said "What was the best...?" but we have people giving "honorable mentions" to end games that just weren't that good.

By looking at the clips on YouTube, I felt in love with the Winner's Circle. Good thing Pyramid is conveniently coming here in Italy soon :D

As a "honorary mention", let me tell about a nice little endgame that were used here in a few different shows, the "Ultimate Yes/No game"

both the winner and the loser of the episode play the game. The host goes back and forth asking yes/no questions to the contestants, waiting for a response. Most often they are prize trade offers like "Will you trade in $100 of your cash winnings for a brand new car?" or "You got a brand new car there. I can excange it for a brand new pair of flip-flops. Will you refuse this trade?", but some questions don't affect gameplay and are played just for fun (like "Tell us, you are being loyal to your wife, aren't ya?"). A flashing light tells the player when it's the right time to shout an answer.

The catch is that the contestants can't hear the questions as they are isolated by host-controlled earphones with some really loud music in there. They work just like the isolation booths on Twenty-One

When this rollercoasters ride of trades ended, the contestants won whatever they ended up with. It wasn't uncommon to see the loser walk away with more stuff than the winner, but the winner still had the chance to come back the next day.