Gene Wood was the show's regular announcer with Johnny Olson and Rich Jeffries substituting during the run.
The contestant provided a verbal response after they had all finished; the celebrities then revealed their answers one at a time, and each match scored a point.
The leader after the third round advanced to face the returning champion in the second half of the hour on Hollywood Squares.
Instead of writing down an answer, the contestants were shown a board with four numbered responses pre-selected by the writers (e.g., "Atlantic City", "Hoboken", "Newark", "Trenton") and kept out of sight of the panel.
The Hollywood Squares half of the show, hosted by Jon Bauman, pitted the Match Game winner against the previous day's champion.
The first contestant to get three of his/her own symbol in a row (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal) or capture five squares won the game.
This version of Squares eliminated that rule, enabling a contestant to win a game on an opponent's error.
When the final bell rang, the contestant in the lead became the day's champion and joined Rayburn on stage to play the Super Match bonus round.
The contestant won an additional $25 and the match by correctly agreeing or disagreeing with the star's answer to Bauman's question.
If a champion retired, a contestant was chosen at random to fill the "X" position on the next day's Squares segment.
Mr. Smith star Leonard Frey and returning Match Game regular Charles Nelson Reilly each appeared for seven weeks.
Other panelists who were previous Match Game regulars or semi-regulars included Fannie Flagg (who appeared for four weeks), McLean Stevenson, Dick Martin, Jimmie Walker, Marcia Wallace, Fred Travalena, Soupy Sales (who had appeared more frequently on the original 1960s version of The Match Game) and Bill Daily.
George Gobel and Abby Dalton, who each appeared for two weeks, were the only former Hollywood Squares regulars to return.
It was also a starting point for new, unknown and up-and-coming stars who went on to greater fame, such as future late-night talk show hosts Jay Leno and Arsenio Hall.
NBC scheduled the series opposite the highly-rated soap operas General Hospital and Guiding Light.
Near the end of its run, network executives announced plans to begin production of the Dobson Productions-created soap opera Santa Barbara, which resulted in the show's cancellation.
A fourth spinoff, this one focusing primarily on country music, Nashville Squares, debuted on CMT in 2019.
[5] Four years later, in 2023, a Black culture-themed version called Celebrity Squares, hosted by D.C. Young Fly, premiered on VH1.
Howard Stern's version, Homeless Howiewood Squares, included Rayburn reprising his role as a regular panelist.
Prior to 2019, the program had never been re-broadcast due to cross-ownership issues between MGM (Orion’s successor and copyright owner for Hollywood Squares episodes produced until 1989), Fremantle (Goodson/Todman’s successor), the CBS Media Ventures division of Paramount Global (successor to King World Productions and current rightsholder to the show's format since 1991 and episodes produced since 1998)[7] and the distribution agents originally responsible for the original NBC run until Fremantle's digital multicast network, Buzzr, aired four episodes (the Tuesday-Friday shows of premiere week) on February 17, 2019.
Buzzr also mentioned that they will be working on digitizing and cleaning up the original master tapes in order to get the show on their regular schedule later in the year.