Games Like Money Drop
The Money Drop is one of the great quiz formats. You are handed a pile of money, every question has a handful of answers, and you have to decide how much of the pile you are willing to put on each one. Everything you leave on a wrong answer falls through the trapdoor. It ran as The Million Pound Drop in the UK, Million Dollar Money Drop in the US, Rette die Million! on ZDF in Germany and Money Drop in a dozen more countries.
What it never really became is a game you can open and play with your friends on a Friday night. Here are six ways to get as close as possible.
1. Split
Split plays the format the way the show does. Everyone starts with 10,000
points, each question has between two and eight answers, and you spread your points
across them on your phone while the host screen shows the piles building up. Only what
sits on the correct answer survives to the next question. Rounds open wide with eight
answers and close on two-answer coin flips.
It runs in the browser with no app and no account, for a group of any size in one room
or on one call, in English or German.
Why is this first in the list? It's great — and I built it.
2. Sporcle Party
Sporcle Party is the closest
thing to the format from an established trivia name. One person hosts, everyone else
joins in, and each question asks players to wager towards their confidence before
answering — the betting instinct of Money Drop without the trapdoors. It is free,
it has a deep question library, and you can write your own packs.
The catch: every player has to install the app first, which is exactly the moment a
party loses its momentum.
3. The Money Drop trivia apps
Search either app store for “Money Drop” and you will find faithful
single-player versions: a starting bankroll, four answers per question, a timer, and
eight questions to survive. Mechanically these are the closest thing to the television
show you can download.
The catch: they are made for one person and one phone. They are a good way to kill
twenty minutes on a train and no way at all to entertain six people in a living room.
4. The Million Pound Drop board game
The UK show was licensed as a
physical board game,
with the trapdoor board, the bundles of money and the question decks in a box. If you
want the tactile version — sliding actual stacks around a table while everyone
argues — this is it.
The catch: it is long out of print, so it is a second-hand purchase, and once you have
played through the question deck it is done.
5. Wits & Wagers
Wits & Wagers
is the best betting trivia game on a table. Everyone writes a numeric guess, all the
guesses go out on a betting mat, and then you bet chips on whichever answer you think
is closest without going over — including somebody else's. It is the same
pleasure as Money Drop: the wager matters more than the knowledge, and you can win a
round without knowing a single answer.
The catch: it is a box you have to own, and it seats fewer people than a screen does.
6. Build the round yourself
Every version above comes with somebody else's questions. If what you actually want is a trapdoor round about your own company, your own family or your own group chat, the Split mechanic is one of the question types in the quizshow.io editor: write the question, write the answers, mark the right one, and set how much everyone starts with.
You can mix it with buzzer questions, estimates and picture rounds, so the trapdoor round becomes the finale of a whole quiz night rather than the entire evening.
Questions people ask
Is something missing on the list? You can always ping me at [email protected]