Rules
Definition's format was loosely based on the word game Hangman. Two teams of two competed, originally a contestant and celebrity and from 1986 on two pairs of regular contestants. The teams would take turns guessing letters in a phrase for which Perry had offered a pun as a clue. The game is similar to Wheel of Fortune, which debuted around the same time.
The challengers began the game one with one teammate "giving away" a letter to their opponents. The usual strategy involved "giving away" a rare letter, such as Q, Z or X. However, the longer a puzzle went unsolved, the more difficult it would become to safely choose a letter that wasn't in the phrase, and some phrases did contain the rare letters as well. If the giveaway letter did not appear in the puzzle, the other player "took" a letter that he believed to be in the puzzle. If the letter wasn't in the puzzle, control passed to the opposing team. However, if the letter was in the puzzle, the team got a chance to guess. Failure to guess correctly passed control to the other team. If the team's giveaway letter was in the puzzle, they lost control and the other team was given a free guess before taking their turn. Play continued in this manner until someone correctly guessed the puzzle.
The first team to solve two puzzles — later changed to three — won the match and advanced to a bonus game. In the bonus game, the champion team faced one final definition, in which the letters would be revealed one by one in alphabetical order. If they solved the puzzle the team received a small merchandise prize and $10 for each unrevealed letter. If they failed to solve the puzzle, $10 was given as a consolation prize. Five consecutive wins allowed the players to play for a bigger prize, such as a refrigerator. After the bonus round the champion switched sides to play with the other celebrity and continued switching until beaten or retired. The civilian teams did not switch sides.
Read more about this topic: Definition (TV Series)
Famous quotes containing the word rules:
“Most of the rules and precepts of the world take this course of pushing us out of ourselves and driving us into the market place, for the benefit of public society.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs ... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“[O]ur rules can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)