Carnival Breeze in Malaga, Spain

Just about everyone grew up playing Hasbro games.  Now some of those old favorites make a new appearance in life-sized splendor in the new Hasbro The Game Show, one of the Funship 2.0 upgrades available when cruising on Carnival‘s newest ship, the Breeze.  These games provide a few lucky people the opportunity to live the games they once played.

Our recent transatlantic voyage on Carnival Breeze included three episodes of Hasbro The Game Show.  We entered the theater to find the stage transformed into a giant game show set.  Anyone sitting in the lower level of the theater may get an opportunity to play, those seated in the balcony can merely observe.

John Heald as game show host

First things first, the host must choose some contestants.  John Heald, the cruise director on our transatlantic voyage, hosted the show, announcing at the very start that it was his first time acting as a game show host.  Special lighting effects divided the theater into blue and red sides, shining blue or red light on each half of the audience.  From the side in the blue light, members of the blue team were chosen, from the red side the red team formed.

wanna-be contestants try to attract attention to get chosen

John Heald asked questions alternately from one side to the other.  Many people knew the answer.  The key to getting chosen required getting his attention.  On the first question a large women ran down the aisle, knocking him down where they both landed in a heap.  Afraid of the consequences of not letting her play, she became a contestant, no answer required.

On subsequent questions people found ways to attract his attention until he had four members on each team.  Those people played the first game offered that show.  For the second game, a repeat of the contestant-choosing questions found eight new people.  Neither of us played in the first show, but in the second episode my husband John got picked to answer a question by shining a light over himself.  It did make him stand out in the audience of a relatively dark theater.

Simon Flash contestants try to line up in the correct sequence

They have a variety of games gone wild so each episode can have some different games.  Simon Flash involves people wearing large colored cubes that light up in four different colors and the first team to arrange themselves in the correct order of which the lights flashed for them wins.  They had several turns at it, each time the lights flashed faster and the team who lined up quickest the most times won.

Hasbro Connect 4 Basketball

Connect 4 involved throwing a basketball into a giant connect 4 board.  The object of course is to get four of your team’s color in a row, but of the teams we watched playing that game one of them struggled just to get a ball into the game board at all.  The other team won easily.

John pushes the giant sorry game piece in Sorry Sliders

John played in Sorry Sliders, where each contestant got a chance to slide a very large sorry-style game piece onto a target area for varying amounts of points.  His team won that game.

Operation Sam Dunk game

The last game we saw, called Operation Sam Dunk, resembled a cross between operation and skee-ball.  Sam, the unfortunate character from the operation game, now appears larger than life on an apparatus resembling a skee-ball table.  Instead of the usual circular target areas this game has separate holes for a variety of body parts worth differing amounts of points.  Given a time limit, each team rolled the ball one after the other as many times as they could in relay fashion before time’s up.  The highest collective team score won.

contestants line up to pick their Monopoly cards

After playing their game, members of the winning team choose cards inspired by monopoly game pieces.  The four from the first game sit in winner’s row, the front row next to the stage which has seats reserved just for them.  After the winners of the second game get their cards then all eight winning contestants insert their cards one by one into a giant monopoly cash machine and the card that registers the highest amount of monopoly money determines the winner.  All players got prizes of some sort involving Hasbro games, the winner of the monopoly money of course receiving the largest prize.

the giant Monopoly money bank determines the winner of the game

We missed the third episode, but had quite a lot of fun at the two we attended.  I would definitely recommend this activity for anyone sailing on a Carnival ship that offers it.  Our ship had this as an afternoon activity on several of the sea days.  Being a transatlantic cruise we had a lot of sea days, which we love.