Premier Fortunes is our own take on one of the most beloved gameshow formats in television history. Here’s how it works: we asked 100 people a question, and your team needs to find the most popular answers on the board. The more of the board you uncover, the more points you win — but get three strikes and you’re out.
How to play
Two teams go head to head. First, we reveal a question based on a survey of 100 people — something like “Name something you find in a kitchen” or “Name a reason someone might be late for work.” Then we rank the answers on the board by how many of the 100 people gave them.
- One player from each team steps up to answer first. Whoever gives the highest-ranked answer on the board wins the right to play
- Next, the winning team works through the board together, naming answers to reveal the hidden entries
- Every correct answer uncovers a board entry and adds points to the running total
- However, three wrong answers — three strikes — hands the other team a chance to steal the points with one correct answer
- Finally, uncover the whole board without three strikes, and the full points belong to you
Why it works so well
Premier Fortunes works because the answers aren’t about being clever — they’re about thinking like everyone else. The obvious answer is often on the board. So the real challenge is different: can you think of enough of them under pressure, with the whole room watching, before you rack up three strikes?
It’s one of the most social games we run. Teams debate answers out loud, the audience groans at wrong answers, and the room reacts the moment someone reveals the final answer to complete the board. Because of that energy, we schedule Premier Fortunes rounds between quiz rounds, which adds a completely different dynamic to the evening.
Premier Fortunes also taps into something psychologists call the “wisdom of the crowd.” In 1906, the statistician Francis Galton found that a crowd’s median guess for an ox’s weight at a country fair landed within about 1% of the true figure, even though no individual guess came that close alone. Games built on popular opinion work on that same principle, so trusting the obvious answer is often smarter than trying to be clever. Read more about the wisdom of the crowd to see why.
Our survey says…
We choose questions to be broadly accessible, so no specialist knowledge is required. That’s the same challenge everyone faces watching this kind of show at home: knowing the answer and finding it under pressure are very different things.
Premier Fortunes is available as part of a full Premier SpeedQuizzing evening or as a standalone format for private and corporate events. Get in touch to find out more.
See all Premier SpeedQuizzing games →
