Any Number

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Drew Carey explains the rules of Any Number to a contestant.

Any Number is a pricing game on the American television game show The Price Is Right. It is played with three prizes: a car, a three-digit prize, and the money in a piggy bank (in dollars and cents from $1.02 to $9.87). While the rules of the game technically allow the piggy bank to be worth as little as $0.12, producer Roger Dobkowitz has stated that he would never actually use an amount lower than $1.02.

Any Number was the first pricing game ever played on The Price Is Right, debuting on its premiere broadcast on September 4, 1972; the contestant was also the first car winner on The Price Is Right, winning a Chevrolet Vega valued at $2,746. It was also the final pricing game of Bob Barker's final episode on June 15, 2007.^[1]

Any Number is one of only two pricing games in which is it not possible to win all of the announced prizes (not including small prizes or cash consolation prizes); the other is the now-retired Telephone Game. It is also one of the few games in which it is impossible not to win a prize, not withstanding the low value of the piggy bank prize.

1 Gameplay
2 History
3 Other versions of Any Number
4 References

[edit] Gameplay

The contestant is shown a game board which lists the three prizes, along with spaces for the digits in their prices. Each digit, 0 to 9, appears exactly once on the board, not including the first digit in the price of the car, which is revealed for the contestant at the start of the game (this amendment made when cars began retailing for more than $10,000).

The contestant is then asked to call out digits, one at a time, and their positions on the board are revealed. The contestant wins only the first prize whose price they complete.

The notorious "losing horns" play only if the piggy bank is won, even though technically winning the 3-digit prize counts as a loss.

[edit] History

Dennis James and a contestant standing beside the original Any Number board.

Originally, cars played for in this game had just four digits in their prices, and no free digit was given. The current version of the board has a sliding top label that can cover the first readout number on the top row. This allowed the game to be played alternately for four or five-digit-priced vehicles, which were still common when the new board debuted during the primetime specials in the summer of 1986.

For the first few playings of Any Number, Anitra Ford would show the contestant an actual piggy bank before the contestant picked numbers. The words "PIGGY BANK" were used instead of the now-familiar image of a piggy bank to label the row of digits representing the amount in the piggy bank.^[2]

[edit] Other versions of Any Number

Any Number has been used on many versions of The Price Is Right besides the US's, usually with the same basic rules. Some of the variations include:

The 1980s UK version with Leslie Crowther, in which the top prize had three digits, the middle prize had two digits, and the piggy bank had only one digit. More recent UK editions used the same format as in the US show.
France's Le Juste Prix, where the game began by revealing the last digit in the big prize's 5-digit price (which was apparently always a 0).
Mexico's Atínale al Precio, which placed the decimal point in the piggy bank's price between the second and third digits so as to allow it to contain more than a negligible amount of money.
Italy's OK, il Prezzo è Giusto!, which had only nine missing digits — the first four of the largest prize, the first three of the smaller prize, and the first two of the piggy bank — and used 0s only to fill in the end of each price.
In several countries, the game's largest prize is only sometimes a car, and still others do not play the game for cars at all.

As with any pricing game, each version of the show has a unique look for Any Number's gameboard; arguably the most appropriate was the design on France's Le Juste Prix, where the prices lit up on a board shaped like a piggy bank.