Treasure Hunters mini-review
I like The Amazing Race, I like puzzles, so ... yeah. Tentative thumbs up.
Puzzles: Not bad at all, and there was even a difficulty curve of sorts. The final puzzle was particularly clever, and while the riddle hinting at the twist was a touch amibguous ("history has a way of changing itself") it wasn't over the foul line.
Editing: Not so good. There were some parts where they made it difficult for me to follow the action (like the spacial relationship between the divers in Hawaii). I chalk this up to inexperience, and hope this improves as things go on.
Having teams of 3: This wasn't as bad as The Amazing Race Family Edition, where every family seemed to blur together so nobody had individual members, but it was hard to distinguish individuals -- I certainly don't remember any names. But the producer's strategy seems to be to emphasize unit-vs-unit conflict rather than people fighting themselves within a group. This might be sensible -- since the challenges have more mental emphasis, infighting may be less strong than people trying to codge off each other's solves, or steal their physical clues (which happened twice in the first episode).
The "Virtual Phil": For the most part the cell phone worked for me, and is likely a better way to deliver clues than on paper (sometimes you never get to see what The Amazing Race clues actually *say*, since the teams don't have a top priority of reading them clearly to the camera). However, delivering the "you are out of the game" message that way seemed tacky, even if it would have been awkward to deliver in person (the host hides in the shadows while the artifacts are being collected?).
Puzzles: Not bad at all, and there was even a difficulty curve of sorts. The final puzzle was particularly clever, and while the riddle hinting at the twist was a touch amibguous ("history has a way of changing itself") it wasn't over the foul line.
Editing: Not so good. There were some parts where they made it difficult for me to follow the action (like the spacial relationship between the divers in Hawaii). I chalk this up to inexperience, and hope this improves as things go on.
Having teams of 3: This wasn't as bad as The Amazing Race Family Edition, where every family seemed to blur together so nobody had individual members, but it was hard to distinguish individuals -- I certainly don't remember any names. But the producer's strategy seems to be to emphasize unit-vs-unit conflict rather than people fighting themselves within a group. This might be sensible -- since the challenges have more mental emphasis, infighting may be less strong than people trying to codge off each other's solves, or steal their physical clues (which happened twice in the first episode).
The "Virtual Phil": For the most part the cell phone worked for me, and is likely a better way to deliver clues than on paper (sometimes you never get to see what The Amazing Race clues actually *say*, since the teams don't have a top priority of reading them clearly to the camera). However, delivering the "you are out of the game" message that way seemed tacky, even if it would have been awkward to deliver in person (the host hides in the shadows while the artifacts are being collected?).