Two contestants compete to answer trivia questions and gain control of an oversized set of dice, which they then roll to eliminate the numbers 1 through 9 from a game board in order to win cash and prizes.
On April 24, 1978, NBC brought High Rollers back with Trebek hosting and aired it until June 20, 1980, when it was one of three series cancelled to make room for The David Letterman Show.
A "bad roll" occurred if the total showing on the dice did not correspond with any combination of the digits still in play.
The first contestant to win two games won the match and advanced to the Big Numbers bonus round.
[4] During the final seven weeks of the first daytime version (April 26 – June 11, 1976), the main game was known as "Face Lifters".
If a contestant made a bad roll, the opponent was allowed one guess for each remaining digit in the picture.
A co-hostess (Ruta Lee, daytime and Elaine Stewart, nighttime) rolled the dice for the contestants.
When the series was revived in 1978 (and originally titled The New High Rollers), the board consisted of three columns with three randomly assigned digits apiece.
to more unusual items such as a collection of musical dolls or a year of Sunday dinners from Kentucky Fried Chicken (a common game show prize of the era[citation needed]).
[5] Frequently, one column offered a chance to play a special game if the contestant claimed it and won the round.
The sound effect for rolling doubles was also used on Wheel of Fortune from 1992 to 2008 when a cash bonus was offered immediately after solving a puzzle in the main game (usually with categories named "Clue", "Fill in the Blank", etc.)
The champion rolled the dice and attempted to remove the digits 1 through 9 from the board, with a large prize awarded for clearing them all.
A bad roll with no insurance markers, or eliminating all digits except for the 1, ended the game and forfeited the money.
The rules were soon changed to eliminate the car bonus and allow the contestant to keep any accumulated money even after making a bad roll.
The round used the same dice table as the 1978–80 version (complete with sound effects) and had the same rules, but the top award was an accumulating jackpot of prizes known as the "Gambit Galaxy."
In 1985, Score Productions composed a theme titled "Bubble Gum," originally for a failed Heatter pilot called Lucky Numbers (intended as somewhat of a revamp of this show with altered gameplay mechanics), which was reused for the 1987–88 version.
[8] A computer game also based on the 1987 version was released for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and MS-DOS by Box Office in 1988.
An Australian version aired on the Seven Network for a brief period in 1975, hosted by Garry Meadows with Delvene Delaney and Suzanne Fox as the dealers.
A Japanese version called SuperdiceQ, hosted by Masaru Doi, aired on TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System) from 1980 to 1984.