Penny Ante
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Penny Ante is a pricing game on the American television game show The Price Is Right. Debuting in 1979, it is played for a prize worth more than $3,000, and it uses grocery items. The game is currently on hiatus.
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[edit] Gameplay
The contestant is given three large pennies and shown two grocery items, one at a time. Each grocery item had four possible prices, only one being correct. The contestant selects which price he thinks is correct.
A correct answer means play moves on to the next grocery item. However, a wrong answer requires the contestant to give up one of the pennies in his possession; he then has to select the correct price from one of the remaining choices.
The game ends in one of the two following ways:
- A second correct answer, in which the contestant wins the prize.
- The contestant exhausts his supply of pennies, resulting in a loss.
[edit] Current status
Although Penny Ante has not been played since June of 2002, it is still regarded as active; it was briefly retired during Season 31, but the staff quickly reversed this decision. However, during the retirement, the game prop was left outside and was damaged beyond repair by a rainstorm. According to Golden-Road.net's Marc Green, Penny Ante is tentatively set to reenter the rotation late in Season 35.
Producers have reassured fans that many distinctive elements of the game's original set will remain intact in the new one.
[edit] Rule changes
The first playings of Penny Ante had much different rules. First of all, the two correct prices for the grocery items could be anywhere on the board, and the goal was to find both prices before the cumulative total of incorrect guesses reached $1.
When the contestant picked a wrong price, pennies in the amount of the wrong price fell into the penny catchers (e.g., if 34 cents was an incorrect guess, 34 pennies fell into the catchers). If the catchers held 100 pennies, the game ended in a loss.
During this format, the board used a completely different color scheme consisting of red, orange and yellow tones. The red "Penny Ante" text from this format remained intact during the earliest days of the green/blue color scheme.
[edit] Trivia
- Penny Ante is notable not so much for its gameplay but for its unique board, which featured strips of lights that looked like pennies, as well as a very distinctive sound effect (which was also used on The Joker's Wild for the "Face the Devil" round). However, the flaps which hid the answer (which revealed either "YES" or "NO") began to open at incorrect cues.
- Penny Ante is one of only two pricing games (the other being Triple Play) which uses the words "YES" and "NO" to determine if the contestant had made a correct guess.
