Any Number
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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). The contestant can win only one of the three prizes.
Any Number is the first pricing game ever played on The Price Is Right, debuting on its premiere broadcast on September 4, 1972.[1].
[edit] Gameplay
The contestant is shown a board with the three prizes, along with spaces for the numbers in the prices. The first digit in the price of the car is then revealed.
The contestant is then asked to call out a digit, 0 through 9, one at a time, and is revealed wherever it belongs. Each digit appears only once on the board (not counting the first digit of the five-digit car, which will also appear in another position).
The contestant wins the first prize whose price is completed. The game is considered a win only if the contestant completes the price of the car.
[edit] Trivia
- 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 was done because when the current board debuted, the game was still being played alternately for four or five-digit-priced vehicles. Conversely, the old board has never been used for a five-digit car.
- The game board did not bear the name of the game when it was first played. The name was added by May 1974.
- Any Number is one of only two games where winning all of the announced prizes is not possible, the other being Telephone Game. Likewise, this game is one of the few where it is impossible to not win a prize (although winning the piggy bank is regarded as a full loss).
- Any Number is also one of only two known pricing games in the current rotation where what is often called the "losing horns" will play without either buzzer immediately preceding it. (The other is Lucky $even.)
- For the first few playings of the game, Anitra Ford would show the contestant an actual piggy bank before the contestant picked numbers. The words "PIGGY BANK" were used instead of the familiar symbol to label the row of digits representing the amount in the piggy bank.[2]
- While the rules of the game technically allow the piggy bank to be worth less than $1.02, producer Roger Dobkowitz has stated that it is something he would never actually do.
- The current Any Number board (pictured above) debuted during the primetime specials in the summer of 1986.
- On the earliest episodes of the 1986-'87 season, which were taped before the above-mentioned specials, the original Any Number board continued to be used.
[edit] Foreign 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. Versions known to differ from the standard format include France's Le Juste Prix, where the game began by revealing the last number 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; and 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. Additionally, 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.
