Pasapalabra

Pasapalabra is a Spanish game show (the title means "pass (the) word" and functions on the show as meaning "pass") to which Shana and I have become a bit addicted.

We first saw part of Pasapalabra while in a restaurant when we had only lived here for about 4 or 5 months. At that time, we had no chance of following what was going on because of our rudimentary Spanish. Now, with much-improved language skills, we can watch the whole show but the main prize-winning round (El Rosco) is still difficult because the presenter reads the questions incredibly fast.

The game is about words, which is really great for continuing to improve our vocabulary. Here is how the game works: first, there is a quick game between the loser from the previous show and a new contestant to see who will play against the winner from the previous show. Each contestant is asked questions whose answers are a single word starting with a particular letter. First person to miss two is done.

Because the loser from the previous show can win this initial game, the same two people can compete several days in a row, as we have already seen. Once the contestants are decided, each is teamed-up with two celebrities forming a team of three. (We have no idea who these B-list celebrities are though.) The two teams compete in a series of challenges whose goal is to accumulate time for their contestant during El Rosco. The challenges are: a series of questions (usually about people) with four possible responses shown on the screen (we tend to do well at this, especially when it is about famous Americans) or movies; a strange name-that-tune type game that feels like amateur hour with the teams often being given credit for a correct answer by being able to sing some of the lyrics; a word search game where a 5x5 letter box (a "sopa de letras") contains three words related to a theme (we have improved at this game); and, finally, a really tough memory game in which each team is shown nine words behind the numbers 1-9 for 2 seconds and then tries to identify the number behind which each given word is located within 90 seconds (every miss covers up all the words again).

All of this leads to El Rosco where the contestants generally have between 125 and 165 seconds to try to provide one-word answers to 25 questions using the letters of the Spanish alphabet (26 plus the en-yay, but not including K or W). Mostly the answers start with the letter indicated although for some (especially en-yay, Q and X) the answer simply contains the letter. The winner from the previous show starts and continues until he either misses a word or, more likely, says "pasapalabra", which then switches the turn to his opponent. The winner is the person who gets more correct, but to win the big money (now 184,000 Euros) you have to get all 25 right, which we have not seen happen yet. (A rosco, by the way, is a traditional round cake eaten at Christmas time. The 25 letters are displayed in a circle around the contestant's face during this round. Hence the name.)

We have been watching for about a week during which a guy named Jero has been easily dispatching his opponent each night and getting close to the big prize, usually getting 22 or 23 of the 25 he needs. He has been on for 20 or so days (winning around 20,000 Euros), which we thought was impressive and very Ken-Jennings-like) until we found on the internet that the record is 128 days. Amazingly, it doesn't appear that the owner of that record actually solved El Rosco and won the big prize.

In any event, we continue to enjoy the show, and consider it our Spanish "Jeopardy," although I am worried that I am going to start hearing "pasapalabra" in my dreams.

Hasta luego,

Jeff and Shana