That One Level / Game Show

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.

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• 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 or 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, which define 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. That's exactly what happened to season 6's Lena & Kristy, who unrolled haybales for eight hours, pushing over 100 bales, and Phil had to come out and eliminate them.
  • The sandcastles from another leg of the race - you had to find a clue that was hidden underneath sandcastles. However, you had to rebuild the sandcastles after digging, so that teams could not simply look at what sandcastles were still standing. Oh, and you were doing this in the pacific island daytime - meaning it was hot, too. It was so bad some teams quit.
  • Any challenge involving animals. This led to the famous "MY OX IS BROKEN!" line from the American Amazing Race because animals simply don't behave all the time.
• Big Brother:
  • The "Slip n slide" challenge in the American edition in which the players have to slide across a greasy (and sometimes inclined) floor while carrying small containers of liquid from one end to the other. Once it's all said and done, everyone's often messy from falling or even nursing injuries.
  • "Jury Statements", the Final Round of the Final Three HOH competition, has gotten lots of flak due to the fact that it often turns into a crapshoot to determine the final Head of Household. The competition is multiple-choice and based around guessing how jury members answered questions about their time in the house. The issue stems from the fact that these answers are extremely subjective rather than being based on fact, and even someone who knows a certain juror extremely well could still answer incorrectly. Production seems to have acknowledged this: starting with Season 20, the Final Round is instead based off of statistics.
  • From the American and Brazilian version, the hot dog/soda challenge. The houseguests were split into two teams and had to climb onto the punching bag shaped like a hot dog or bottle of soda and then ride it to the other side while the teams had to operate a pulley to get it from one side to the next. The challenge encouraged teamwork, but at the same time was slanted towards taller people because shorter people would slip and fall right on off of the punching bag.
  • One task in the British series involved the house having to sort various flavours of crisps. They knew which one(s) were which by licking them. By the end, everyone's tongues were sore from all the salt and some people lost their senses of taste for awhile.
• 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. On one infamous instance of "Garbage Truck", the flag was so well-camouflaged that it took all four family members, host Marc Summers, and a couple crew members to find it, and it was found just at the end of the credit scroll.
• When Family Feud returned for syndication for 1999, the scoring format was drastically altered. The game consisted of three Single Rounds and one Triple Round with no point goal and the leader at the end playing Fast Money. The Triple Round became this due to the number of Strikes being reduced from three to one. This sometimes created an awkward situation where a trailing team could lose by not coming up with enough points before the other family got a chance to steal. Beginning with Richard Karn's second season, the show reverted to a more conventional play to 300 points with the Triple Round allowing three Strikes again. However, Karn was still allowed to read the question in its entirety only once, a rule that was eventually dropped when John O'Hurley started hosting.
• Ever had trouble finding something buried deep in your closet or in your attic? Then you can see why the Closet and the Attic were the two most dreaded rooms on Nickelodeon's Finders Keepers. Many teams came unstuck in the main game and especially the Room Romp if they had to search the Closet or the Attic simply because both rooms were absolutely jam packed with possible hiding places. Pity the teams who entered one of those rooms to be greeted by the Instant Prize flashing lights and bell; their chances of winning that trip to Disney World or Space Camp were slight at best.
• Jeopardy!:
  • Many contestants seem to have trouble with categories that deal with high culture, such as the opera and ballet; or categories where the contestant is required to spell the correct response. Lampshaded whenever the producers name such a set something like "The Dreaded Opera Category".
  • Sometimes the most inexplicable answer will rear its head in Final Jeopardy! A notorious one asking for a cheese named for a singing group (Liederkranz) is often considered the pinnacle of arcanely obscure Final Jeopardy! clues.^note The objective of a good Final Jeopardy! clue is one that requires some thought, but also not arcane or obscure that no one, except for those who happen to know the answer, has a reasonable chance at providing even a reasonable guess. An example might be the category "WWE Wrestling" and a clue that deals with Pedro Morales becoming the organization's first "Triple Crown" winner (to win the World Heavyweight, Tag Team and Intercontinental titles). Almost no one (short of a professional wrestling fan and/or historian) would be able to answer a question, for instance, about whom he defeated (Ken Patera) to win the Intercontinental title, much less identify Morales as the first Triple Crown winner. But ask a question such as "On the December 1980 night Pedro Morales defeated bad guy Ken Patera at New York City's Madison Square Garden to win the WWF Intercontinental Championship, this event that made world headlines happened ... just a few blocks away." Again, many game show contestants may not have the faintest idea about professional wrestling, but the average contestant with a broad knowledge base could figure out that the correct response is "What is the death of John Lennon?". (Meaning, most people — especially those involved with music — know who John Lennon is, even those who were born years after his death, and that he is deceased, and a lot of people are aware that he died on a December night in 1980 in New York City.) The latter Final Jeopardy! clue still requires some thought — i.e., "What might have happened in December 1980 in New York City that would make it world news?" — but is still very answerable.
• Legends of the Hidden Temple
  • The Shrine of the Silver Monkey is 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. And that’s not going into if a Temple Guard was in the room as well.
  • The Dark Forest, 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.
  • The Jester's Court, mostly because not all players were tall enough to reach the switches.
• Minute to Win It:
  • Supercoin. 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), and with Apolo now hosting, it's safe to say that it will never will (the million dollars, that is).
  • Don't Blow the Joker is 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...
• The Price Is Right: A number of pricing games are notoriously difficult to win (and often has many a contestant who lost a pricing game to be informed that it's "Comeback Time!" in the Showcase Showdown), you'll understand why the majority of the winners who won the Showcase round are people who lost a pricing game.
  • Lucky $even, where contestants begins with a $7 bankroll - call out digits one at a time to the price of a car, lose $1 for every dollar they're off on each number, needing $1 after the last digit to be able to win the car. While some prices such as $16,545 are used on what's expected to be an easy playing, more often than not the price contains digits at both ends away from "5" (i.e., 1, 2, 8, and 9) to take out contestants who – on the third through fifth numbers – guess down the middle or go for the wrong extreme. And this isn't just a current-day thing, either - a 1975 episode on the official DVD set (released in 2008) has a playing with a price of $7,010.
  • Master Key is one of those Luck Based missions, and it even expects contestants to get one or both wrong. Heck, even if they get at least one right, it even expects contestants to get only one key, and to top it all off it even expects contestants to get the Dud key. Why? Because there's no telling which key opens a lock, which one is the dud key, and which one is the Master Key itself, making it impossible to tell which key is which.
  • On The Nose was played from 1984 to 1985, and was a car game in which the player had to complete a sporting feat to win the car, with a set number of chances owing to how well the player priced the car (the furthest away from the price only got one chance with whatever implement was to be used to attempt the feat [darts, baseballs, footballs etc.], while getting the price right [one of the prices was the right price] gave the player four chances at it, and a $1000 bonus [the prices that were not exact awarded no bonus]). The implement being used in the particular sport was also revealed when Holly Hallstrom opened up the box by the chosen price (meaning that, say, if it were throwing a football through a hole, footballs would come out; if it were pitching a baseball, baseballs would come out). This game has been very much a Luck-Based Mission, because sometimes, even if you had exact proper technique, the vagaries of how the goals were set up could still have you missing and losing (mitigated, however, if you got the right price, in which you got the maximum number of attempts and the $1000 bonus to fall back on).
  • Pass the Buck has become this due to inflation becoming a factor in the past decade. It is another car game and inflation has made the grocery product portion more difficult in the past several years. The contestant must pass the dollar to the product they think needs the dollar. Then they must pick 1-6 on the board. Thanks to it being yet another Luck-Based Mission, they could pick Lose Everything as their only pick and walk away empty-handed. If there's one saving grace to this difficult game, Drew counts picking the car as an Instant-Win Condition.
  • Pathfinder is a difficult game to win at due to having to work with 4 different numbers surrounding you; you have to pick one of the numbers and if it's wrong, then you have to guess the price of a small item in order to keep playing and there's only 3 items in the game; four mistakes total ends the game in a loss. The game gets slightly easier if the player stands in a corner or at the edge of the game board since there's less numbers to work with at that spot. Not helping matters is these days, all four choices for the second digit will always be consecutive. For example, if the first number is 1, count on having 6, 7, 8 and 9 as your the choices for the second digit.
  • 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. For a while, there were only one or two correct solutions out of 180 possible arrangements, 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^note The proper strategy is as follows: 1. Let's call A the highest price, B the next highest, and so on down to F, the lowest price. Save A for the top tier (obviously). 2. If B < min(C+F, D+E), put B on the bottom; else if C < min(B+F, D+E), put C on the bottom, else put D on the bottom. 3. Then of the remaining 4 items, pair up the most expensive and least expensive, pair up the last 2, and put whichever pair gives you the lower total on the 2nd tier and the more expensive pair on the 3rd tier.; during this time, only one contestant figured it out, and unfortunately he bailed too soon. (The game has recently been set up so that there are multiple correct solutions, including ones where the cheapest item can go in the mailbox; even then, it took until April 2013 for the $100,000 to be won.)
  • Plinko: By a strict reading of the rules, this fan favorite is virtually impossible to win outright. While the pricing aspect is easy enough, the producers only count the game as "won" if you earn all five chips and drop them all into the $10,000 slot, a feat which has never been accomplished and probably never will.
  • Pocket ¢hange, another game played for a car. In this luck-based mission, the contestant is given an initial selling price of 25 cents, given an initial bankroll of 25 cents and then asked, one at a time, to fill in the second through fifth digits of the car's price from a field of six numbers, four fitting and two of them duds. For every guess the contestant is incorrect, another 25 cents is added to the car's price. Once a digit is filled in, they are asked to select an envelope from the gameboard and the number is removed from play; once the price is completed, the contents of each envelope are revealed – they contain random amounts, anywhere from no money to $2 – and if after all the envelopes are revealed the contestant's bankroll meets or exceeds the selling price, the contestant wins the car. The difficulty factor is twofold:
    • It is notoriously difficult enough to fill in the car's price perfectly, much less with just one or two mistakes, as most of the incorrect guesses on the second and third numbers will boost the car's price considerably.
    • Of the 20 envelopes available, there is just one envelope each containing 75 cents and $2; three others have 50 cents, but the other 15 have amounts ranging from nothing to the most common amounts of 5, 10, and 25 cents. With just four picks, it is very difficult to meet the car's selling price, even with just one or two mistakes, and even with the $2 card found, really tough if too many mistakes are made. ^note (The most number of mistakes possible is 11, which would boost the car's selling price to $2.75; in this case – and it's happened – the $2 slip and either the 50- or 75-cent cards, or two of the 25-cent cards would need to be found to win.)
  • Stack the Deck, a grocery-pricing game played for a car where contestants are shown three sets of two grocery items, each one having a price and the contestant having to match the price with the correct item; a correct answer allows the contestant to have one of the digits (from a field of seven possible choices) inserted into the price; after all pricing questions are played, the contestant is asked to fill in the remaining blanks with the remaining digits. The difficulty is two-fold:
    • The pricing questions tend to be difficult enough already, with the price of the incorrect item often being a few cents off the item it's paired with. On particularly difficult playings, an unfortunate contestant can end up with no free picks, meaning they are completely on their own to price the car.
    • Even on playings where a contestant earns all three available picks, many of the contestants still lose because they did not guess the remaining two numbers correctly. Often, this is because a contestant will frequently pick the first and/or second numbers, rather than the more difficult-to-guess third through fifth numbers. (Leaving the first two numbers open often then leaves an "either-or" proposition, especially if a 1, 2, and either an 8 or 9 are among the remaining numbers, and contestants that are particularly knowledgeable about car pricing can figure things out from the number choices available.)
  • 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.
  • That's Too Much is a game that even Drew mentions is hard to win. There is a series of 10 prices for a car in increasing order and you have to stop at the first price that is higher than the actual retail price. 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). For a period in Season 37 (2008-09), the correct answer was almost always the second or ninth picks, further fueling frustration over this game and spawning a Fan Nickname of "That's Two Ninth", and the producers only reluctantly relented once enough fans complained – that, and a couple of contestants figured out the scheme and won the car.
  • 3 Strikes is another Luck-Based Mission meets car game - either the player draws a number or a strike. It is very well possible to draw all three strikes before lighting a single number in the car's price. The rules were changed several times, the first of which was an attempt to make the game slightly easier. There was considerable outcry from fans during Season 37 because of controversial rule changes to the game and it was no longer being played for luxury cars. In a case of Author's Saving Throw, the following season would bring back its original rules^note three strike chips in the bag and brought the luxury cars back.
  • 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 (commonly called "Bullseye '72" among fans, to distinguish it from the current-day game called Bullseye which debuted in 1976), 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, with one contestant managing to miss a win by $1. Not even giving the contestant a $500 range (on the third and fourth playings), playing for a boat instead of a car (on the latter), or rounding the price to the nearest $10 (on the fifth and final playing) helped.
• Pyramid:
  • Categories dealing with famous people often have caused trouble for teams, except for those who are aware that – unless otherwise stated – the receiver had to say just the last name. Lampshaded once in a 1980s episode, where a category read "I Hope It's Not Names"; the subject was "Things a Pyramid contestant might think about."
  • During tournament episodes of the $100,000 version, the fifth and sixth categories are notoriously difficult, and sometimes virtually impossible for all but the brightest of clue-givers to give acceptable clues for. Abstract categories such as, well "Things That Are Abstract" or "Things That Are Straight" are often found in the upper-tier boxes, making for exciting television when a good game player is able to successfully get his/her partner to give the correct answer. Even during regular rounds where $10,000 and $25,000 is being played for, the sixth box tends to be the most difficult and gives celebrity-contestant teams the most trouble.
• Survivor has its own page due to various challenge(s) or location(s) that proved problematic.
• 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.
• Wheel of Fortune:
  • Until the late 1990s, it wasn't unheard of for Round 1 and/or the last round to be a fairly short puzzle without a lot of common consonants. This would lead to things like GIMME A BUZZ, where it took thirteen turns before anyone uncovered a consonant.
  • During the 12th season (1994-1995), there was 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 (although one contestant did not get credit for this Loophole Abuse sentence: "The contestants did not know what the word PROLIFERATION meant"). 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. Other times, they just use a totally arbitrary, random phrase like WILDLY HAPPY GUY or WHAT A KICK.
  • Still other puzzles require not only for the contestant to offer a solution exactly as it appears on the board – a rule that's been there since the very beginning – an exact, correct pronunciation (in the judges judgment) is required. Pronounce "MILAN, ITALY" or "REGIS PHILBIN AND KELLY RIPA" incorrectly, and you're out thousands of bucks.

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