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Table of Contents:

• What colors were used for the cash slides?
• What colors were used for prizes?
• How did the prizes change when they were hit?
• How did the special prizes (Double Your $$, Add-A-One) work?

Q: What colors were used for the cash slides?
A: Different colors were used at different points in the show's run. The pilot used these colors:

As you can see, the only colors used were blues and greens. From left to right: blue, indigo, dark blue, and green. The $1400 slide (not pictured) is considered to be a slightly brighter shade of blue.

Additional colors were added when the show first aired:

From left to right: pale blue (not used much), red, chartreuse (also not used much), and off-white. If you haven't ever seen off-white used, it's because it only lasted for the first two weeks on the show, and was only used for $300 and $2000. After the first two weeks, these were changed to red. Pink is also listed on the end, but wasn't added for another two months. Pink was only used for the single $1500+S slide, and was the only cash slide to not have coins in the background.

For Season 3, completely new slides were used with these five colors:

To avoid ambiguity, this website uses Jason Wuthrich's PYL GameControl as a guide to naming these colors. From left to right we have purple, navy, aqua, lime, and orange (compared to the maroonish "red" from the earlier board, this does look more orange).

Jim Balcerek uses the following RGB values for his cash slides (and these are the values used for this site):

Here are the RGB values used for some of the other slides:

Q: What colors were used for prizes?
A: Once again, different colors were used for different prizes.

As you can see, four colors were used: red, blue, green, and black. Red was by far the most common color. However, its exact shade is somewhat elusive -- some slides appear to almost be a deep maroon, while others come close to being a Crayola shade of orange. (In my younger days I swore that it was brown, and my computer version of the game -- written in QBasic for DOS -- used burnt sienna to simulate the color.) You could find blue and green here and there on the board. Black was the rarest color, though. Due to not being sure what color would come up on the board, I decided to mark all Prize spaces on this website gray.

Q: How did the prizes change when they were hit?
A: The general agreement is that each slide projector could hold six slides. This wasn't necessary in the case of most squares, but it became very important for the prize spaces. When a prize was hit and the camera was off the board (usually on the contestants), the projector would load the next slide, which appeared when the camera returned to the board. Once in a great while they'd mess up, and you could see the prize square turn black for a moment, and then light back up with a new prize. I would have thought that the "hole" would create a white square instead of black, actually.

Q: How did the special prizes (Double Your $$, Add-A-One) work?
A: These three prizes are special because they all strictly award cash, but are located where a prize would appear, and turn into another prize when hit.

		Double Your $$ (round two only) "Double Your $$" was added to the prize rotation when Pick A Corner debuted, and first appeared on March 8, 1984. DY$ could appear in any of the Prize slots, and would usually hang around for a few episodes until someone hit it. It would then disappear only to come back a few weeks later, usually in a different prize slot. Its color was the same as Pick-A-Corner -- yellow text on a lime green background. DY$ made its final appearance in [2] in early December 1985, and hit on the last day of that board configuration. When you hit this square, of course, your score doubled.
		Double Your $$ + One Spin (round two only) On April 12, 1984, "Double Your $$ + One Spin" debuted with a darker green background. Hitting this square had the same effect as the square above, but you also got an extra spin. Possibly due to potential financial concerns, it never appeared during a Home Player Sweepstakes episode. Unlike its sister without a spin, this space lasted until the end of the series.
		Add-A-One (round one only) Add-A-One premiered September 5, 1985. When hit, Add-A-One would be replaced by a prize (like Double Your $$) and a "1" would be added to the front of your score -- for example, $470 became $1470, $2050 became $12050, and $0 became $10. Kevin Cheung has found the mathematical forumla for finding how much cash should be added to one's score on hitting Add-A-One: Add-a-One(x), where x is your current score, x being a member of Z, Add-a-One(x) = 10 if x = 0, 1 10ceiling(log(x)), otherwise.

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