Puzzles

I watched the first three episodes tonight.

The first two episodes had puzzles that were relatively easy to solve as long as the contestants paid attention to the clues, the objects that the clues pointed to, and were somewhat observant of their surroundings. The audience could play along a little bit, even though the host tended to give things up pretty quickly after the clue reveal.

The third episode, however, took a bit of a turn. One of the clues were objects for a pool table and no word clue to go with them. The answer was something relatively difficult because it was something that you would never think of doing unless you had time to try everything, which the contestants don't.

This speaks to the problem with puzzle shows. You want to make it the puzzles difficult enough to be interesting but not so difficult that the contestants get stuck and flounder around for the entire episode, that gets boring after the first five minutes.

Beyond the puzzles I'm not all that thrilled with the format. The current format is to solve 5 completely unrelated puzzles. Personally, I would have rather seen them construct a single puzzle that has to be solved by continually following the clues to the end. That way everything is related in some way. They could still keep the 5 lights, just set the single puzzle in stages.