Says You! is an American Radio Game Show that runs on NPR; it's loosely based on the long-running BBC Panel Game My Word!. Two teams of three players each, picked from a cast of media personalities and academics that has gradually shifted from regular to rotating, are pitted against each other in a battle of wits and knowledge of words and trivia. Though Richard Sher, the late creator and host of Says You!, described the show at the start of every episode as "A simple game with words played by two teams," the questions within the various rounds often contain riddles and terms far exceeding any ordinary game in obscurity and downright cruelty to the players.
Says You! is played in five rounds: three rounds of general trivia or wordplay games, and one round for each team to play a "fictionary"-style bluffing game against the other. Each question or bluff/bluff-guess is worth up to 10 points (leading to a maximum potential score of 110); partial credit is given for partial answers or answers found through extra help. No prizes are awarded to the winners, other than bragging rights; it's Just for Fun.
The show's website is here
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New listeners are always advised to grab a pen and paper.
Production shut down at the end of the 25th season, but the show continues to air in reruns. Season 26 so far mostly consists of re-edited episodes from season 8.
(There may still be hope: what was originally being advertised as a "final" live show when the show was canceled later started just being called a "reunion" show instead, no longer with the suggestion that it's the final one. In fact, the show went out of its way to never say that it'd been canceled, not even on its final episode of new material)
Tropes:
- The Ace: Longtime regular cast member Barry Nolan has the most ridiculously difficult question of nearly any round saved for him... and gets it right.
- Bait-and-Switch Comment: Combined with Overly Narrow Superlative in one of their classic send-offs, "Remember, more radios are tuned to this program than any other appliance."
- Foreign Sounding Gibberish: In most of the bluffing round words. Yes, they are English words. No, you likely have never heard them before. Many of them haven't been in common use for centuries; many others are extremely specific professional terms.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: Occasionally heard; e.g., substituting "accent aigu" for "acute accent".
- Hurricane of Puns: Any game involving a verbal charade.
- Lame Pun Reaction: Serious groaners are often sprung by the panelists.
- Perfectly Cromulent Word: The bluffing round words. The twist is that they're all real, just long outdated. It's two out of the three definitions for each word that aren't real.
- Shout-Out: The February 12, 2019, round of Definitions and Derivations, which cited TV Tropes as its source, challenged its panelists to identify severalnote tropes based on their names:
- Viewers Are Geniuses: Listeners Are Geniuses: Says You! can be even harder to play along with at home than Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.
